I was extremely lucky to find an 1890 lengthy obituary for my Scottish gt.grandmother's brother Kenneth Mackenzie b1817, which not only described the man but how someone of modest beginnings can attain so much more. It also explains why my grandfather moved outside the naming pattern and had a son called Ken:
<Mr. Mackenzie was born seventy-three years ago at the Clyde Iron works, where, under the eye of Messrs. Dunlop, he received that excellent business training which stood so well to him in after years. He was a man, too, who built his own fortune, who owed his success in life to his native ability, to his straightforwardness of purpose, to his unbending integrity, and to his resolute perseverance, because he began life empty-handed, and at the bottom of the ladder with nothing to help him onward and upward but the characteristics we have just mentioned. But to a man like Mr. Mackenzie this was all that was necessary, for to such good purpose did he apply them, and so absolutely trustworthy was he, that while quite a young man, he was promoted to the managership of the very iron works he entered as a boy. ...........
Always plain and unostentatious, he had ever a smile for, and was always accessible to, his humblest employee, while at the same time he was capable of exacting the respect of the proudest in the land.
The welfare of his people bulked largely in his mind, and his many services to them will not soon be forgotten. By his demise the poor and needy have lost one whose ear was never closed to their cry of distress, and whose purse-strings were never drawn tight in the face of want. Throughout his whole life he believed in the doctrine (and what was better, he constantly practiced it) that it is better to help to build a man up than to knock him down.
Mr. Mackenzie was one of Nature’s musicians ...>
