In this week’s Practitioner podcast, Martha Frick Symington Sanger, great-granddaughter of Henry Clay Frick, explores how family trauma can live on through stories, silences, and the objects passed from one generation to the next. Drawing on the 10-year process of researching her family history, Sanger discusses the grief that shaped Frick’s art collecting, the resistance she encountered from relatives seeking to protect his legacy, and the power of examining the past to interrupt patterns before they reach the next generation.

The conversation offers a preview of themes Sanger will explore during her pre-conference session on narratives at the 2026 FFI Global Conference.

Martha Frick Symington Sanger is the great-granddaughter of industrialist and art collector Henry Clay Frick and the author of Henry Clay Frick: An Intimate Portrait. Her research into Frick’s life took 10 years and eventually led her beyond the familiar public story of the industrialist, philanthropist, and collector to something much more personal: the profound grief that followed the death of his young daughter Martha.

Martha had swallowed a pin as a small child. The cause remained undiscovered as she suffered for years, ultimately dying at age six. Sanger came to believe that Frick never recovered from the loss—and that his grief can be seen, in part, through the art he chose to collect and the objects with which he surrounded himself.

But uncovering that story was not easy.

In this week’s podcast, Sanger discusses resistance from members of her own family who wanted to protect Henry Clay Frick’s name, as well as what she learned from looking closely at objects connected to previous generations.

Her experience raises questions that extend far beyond the Frick family. What gets communicated through the things families save? What do later generations absorb from experiences that were never openly discussed? And what happens when someone finally examines a long-protected family narrative?

For Sanger, uncovering what she describes as the “curse of Martha” ultimately revealed something hopeful: examining the past gives families an opportunity to understand what has been carried forward, interrupt destructive patterns, and keep unresolved trauma from contaminating the next generation.

It is a provocative idea for family enterprise professionals, whose work so often takes place at the intersection of history, identity, relationships, assets, and objects imbued with meaning.

Listen to the conversation with Martha Frick Symington Sanger, and join her in New York for a deeper exploration of narratives during the FFI at 40 pre-conference session at The Century Club.

Join Martha, along with Peter Gallagher and Charles Avery Fisher on Wednesday, October 28th at the Century Club for Narratives: Shifting Paradigms in Family Enterprise.

Register Here

https://digital.ffi.org/narratives-shifting-paradigms-in-family-enterprise/

About the Contributor

Martha Frick Symington Sanger has spent the past twenty years researching her Frick family and its contributions to industry, art, philanthropy and the cities that family members called home. Her first biography focused on the life, accomplishments and controversies of Henry Clay Frick, her great-grandfather (“Henry Clay Frick: An Intimate Portrait,” Abbeville Press 1998).