INTERVIEW: Family Tales - How Historical Recall Is Central To Abbot Downing's Offering

Tom Burroughes

23 March 2017

Teaching people about their ancestors and how previous generations won fortunes, lost them, won them back and established values making for happiness and success isn’t just a diverting hobby around genealogy. In the wealth management space, getting a handle on what makes a family tick can be powerful for client and provider alike.

At Abbot Downing, the division of Wells Fargo that handles the affairs of ultra-high net worth individuals, organizing a family history archive and writing a family narrative is not a “nice-to-have” offering that can make for an attractive book to put on a coffee table and show to friends. It is far more significant than that. The offering is an integral part of what the firm does for clients, Dr. Andy Anderson, chief historian at Wells Fargo, told this publication recently.

“It is such a powerful thing for families to have, to see in a way what they stand for. We give families a “priceless gift,” Dr Anderson said. He spoke to Family Wealth Report shortly before Abbot Downing announced the appointment of Mark Speltz, former American Girl Historian, who joined the firm’s Family & Business History team. That group is part of an emerging family governance service comprised of 14 family dynamics and education consultants and historians, many of whom hold doctorate or master’s degrees in history, psychology, business or behavioral science.

These family histories are also not vanity projects. With one or two exceptions, they aren’t published to the outside world and for the use only of a family that commissions them. This point talks to their use in highlighting the values that can hold a family together, he said.

“The main question from almost every family is: “Can you explain to us how hard it was to get to where we are’?” Dr Anderson said.

Since the formation of Abbot Downing five years’ ago, the archive-gathering and history-writing offering has been a central, established feature of what is given to clients, he said. “This is the best way to take a pause and reflect on how we got where we are,” he continued.

The development of this family history offering is an example of how, when private bank offerings sometimes closely resemble each other, a bank might try to offer a differentiated service. Dr Anderson said there are some other firms that give a sort of history service but they tend to be outsourced affairs. He said the Abbot Downing approach is unique by being integrated into the multigenerational planning at the heart of wealth management, today.

History boom
There has been a surge of interest across all wealth groups in the US, and further afield, in tracing ancestry and family histories, he said. Television shows often feature such stories. There remains, for various reasons, fascination with the lives of the mega-rich, such as those of the Rockefellers and Fords of earlier eras right down to the Silicon Valley tycoons of today.

Dr Anderson gives some data on the scale of the surge of interest: About 12 years’ ago, ancestry.com, a popular website aiding such family history searches, had, had about 1 billion records online; today, it has about 18 billion. Clearly, the internet and the advent of Big Data-style technologies has enormously boosted the volume of such records when contrasted with the paper era, he said. When researching families’ lives, Abbot Downing’s teams give equal prominence to the male and female sides of families – there is no gender bias here, he said.

This is a job for professionals. Dr Anderson has a PhD in history from The Ohio State University, and has taught history at Ohio State, Arizona State, and Stanford universities. He completed his archival training at the Hoover Institution and the Archives Institute of the National Archives of the United States. Other historians at Wells Fargo include: Dr Gretchen Krueger, with a degree in medical history from Yale, Dr Julian Saltman, with a degree in military history from the University of California, Berkeley, and Nicole DeRise, with a degree in public history and archives from NYU. Dr Anderson has an online guide on how families can navigate and unearth their history, How to Find Your Family History, Cultural Roots & DNA Ancestry, which is given to clients to encourage further exploration of roots by multiple generations of the family.

One way of illustrating the power of such histories is how the younger generations are included in the process, Dr Anderson said. “When we put histories together, we try to get the younger members of a family to take part in reading from them, or using their new technology devices and applications to tell the story to their ancestors.” This, he said, helps to cement the learning process.

Another point is that these histories, while they may end up as considerable works, typically don’t get into the public domain. “These are being used very practically as lessons-learned,” he said.

And that is the perhaps the key take-home point from a family history - they are practical guides to the current, and future generations on the values that have brought about wealth in the first place. Given the old adage of “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations”, history might be a useful way to keep families on track.