Biology offers the beginning of an answer. But there has never been a family solely of blood.
Trusted lawyers, financial advisors, household managers, and other personnes de confiance may be considered family. Affinity makes a family as much as, and perhaps even more than, law or DNA.
What about nonhuman family members? Anyone who has shared ownership of a family business or family vacation home knows that these often have a “seat at the kitchen table” when it comes to thinking through important decisions.
It’s easy to see how this could be the case with a “pot trust” or “sprinkle trust,” where multiple generations across multiple branches of an extended clan intimately knew “the Trust” and its benefactions. In very old families, the same trust might have tapped the shoulders of several generations of beneficiaries.
The ancestor of the pot trust was “the estate,” originally the family’s ancestral seat. Surely such an estate would qualify as the longest-lived family member?
Most dynastic trusts now have provisions for division per stirpes. If “the” trust continues at all—a big “if” in our day of decanting and restatements—it is known as “my” XYZ Trust. “My” XYZ Trust would probably look much different from my cousin’s XYZ Trust. Would it remain the same family member?
By James E. Hughes and Keith Whitaker
Second in the 2026 series
Is this ghost restless? Or friendly? Families exclude their ghosts from their governance system at their peril; a family’s ghosts are, almost always, critical parts of it.
In the case of a trust, the way to bring the ghost into a beneficent relationship with the family is through ritual. Ritual offers gratitude from living family members and rebirth to the ghost. Such rituals can take the form of celebrating the appointment of a new trustee; celebrating when a beneficiary comes of age; annually commemorating the wishes or intent of the grantor (or, in the absence of the expression of such wishes, the stories of that grantor’s life); and inviting the trustee, as representative of this “family member,” to relevant family meetings, discussions, and decision-making.
In other writings, the authors have said that a trust, to be useful to a family, must contribute to a culture of care. Care means that the trustee seeks to enable the trust to enhance the lives of its beneficiaries. Such trustees are profoundly committed to the well-being of the families whose trusts they administer. Isn’t it likely that they will be seriously positive contributors to the family, making excellent long-term decisions toward the flourishing of all parts of its system?
Should such a trust endure, the trustees will see how the family journey turns out. With their responsibility for good governance, such trustees may have the longest-term effect on the family’s flourishing and well-being.
What could be a more effectual definition of a “family member”?
Given these reasons, can you see why we believe that such trustees can be a critical part of family governance, and why their inclusion in the family’s decision-making is a crucial element of wise governance?
