With their interest in family business no longer serving as the cornerstone of the geographically scattered Pitcairns, the “business” of generation four revolves around the management of their financial assets and their philanthropic activities. Many of these are tied to the Swedenborgian church, including supporting educational institutions. Clan elders Pendleton and Junge help organize family gatherings at Bryn Athyn, where the current generation of young children, members of the fifth and sixth generations of Pitcairn heirs, learn how their grandmother would assemble gift boxes of baby clothes for every newborn child in the community. “We are able to have meetings and gatherings around these activities now, listening to our family stories and making philanthropic decisions,” Junge says. “We want our biggest focus today to be maintaining those family ties, and let everyone pursue his own business interests.”

The vast majority of family members have opted to let either Pendleton or Junge manage their assets. Junge runs a traditional for-profit multifamily office, Pitcairn Financial Group, while Pendleton offers similar services through the nonprofit Cairnwood Cooperative, open only to family members. In other areas, they operate as a tight unit, whether they are bolstering the Swedenborgian church or working on the family oral history project. “We [have been] pulling together the family archives, and found letters between our grandmother and Winston Churchill,” Junge says. “We hold ceremonies that we call ‘honoring the elders,’ where senior members of the family talk about their lives and the family, so that the children can learn where they come from. And then we hold family talent shows.”

You need to create new institutions outside the context of the family company and identify new leaders in the family, people who may or may not be business leaders, but who command respect from across the different family groupings.”

Others among the Pitcairn heirs have started new businesses of their own, an aspiration that often resurfaces among fourth generation heirs. Perhaps it is a thread of the entrepreneurial spirit winding through them, as it did with their great-grandfather, or an urge to prove that they can be as intrepid as the patriarch. “There’s a sense that they should prove their own worth as businesspeople, to earn their own place in the business hall of fame through their own achievements, and not just because of their last name,” says Amy Braden, head of the Family Wealth Center at JP Morgan Private Bank.

Pendleton’s brother Kirk, fascinated with aquaculture, founded Sea Farms International in the 1970s and has overseen the company’s growth into one of the largest shrimp-farming ventures in the world, and the largest corporate employer in Honduras. It was not his first business: In the mid-1960s, he founded GK Partners, a cattle company in Missouri, later sold at a significant profit. With his son, Thayer, he also launched a Roswell, Ga.-based company, InterAg, that applied hardware, software and satellite mapping technology to farm vehicles and farmers. He sold that business to John Deere in 1999.

Often these new businesses can serve as a bridge between the family’s past and its future, because they are funded by loans or investments from the family office. Indeed, families increasingly see backing new businesses as an integral part of a family office’s responsibilities—and as another way to strengthen relationships between family members. “Sometimes, of course, those new businesses don’t flourish, but sometimes you also see them thrive,” says Nancy-Beth Sheerr, senior portfolio manager at Veritable, a family wealth advisor in Pennsylvania. “And when they do, you see a renewal of the feeling of pride and satisfaction that comes not just from preserving a family heritage but from reinventing it by demonstrating their own entrepreneurial courage.” In a way, she says, a start-up business is the ultimate tribute that fourth-generation heirs can pay to their progenitors. “It’s the fourth generation becoming the first generation for their own great-grandchildren, and repeating the pattern.”

Suzanne McGee is a New York-based freelance writer. After 14 years as a staff reporter at the Wall Street Journal, she now writes about financial markets and corporate finance, philanthropy, corporate governance and the art world for a number of publications.

Illustrations by Jonathan Barkat.

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