Chris Whitten

Biography

Chris grew up in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, with his mother Donna and brother Ted. His father Ted and step-mother Vicki were in the nearby town of Ashby.

In 1989 he graduated from Fitchburg High School and went on to Lyndon State College in the beautiful Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. After two years in the small business program at Lyndon he transferred to New York University. He graduated from NYU with a degree in economics in 1993.

After college he stayed in New York City and worked as the managing editor of a small mail order book catalog named Laissez Faire Books. Before Amazon this was the only source for many unusual books on libertarian philosophy and free-market economics. In 1994, he started experimenting with the Internet to announce and sell new books. The email list he created there was one of the first of its kind.

In 1995 Chris left his job to create a libertarian community and networking site called Free-Market.Net: The Freedom Network (FMN). This site has been called "the mother of all libertarian websites" for its early work in promoting usage of the Internet among pro-freedom organizations and individuals around the world.

In 1997 he created a non-profit organization in Chicago called The Henry Hazlitt Foundation to be a home for FMN and its sister sites including libertarian.org, ifeminists.com and Bureaucrash. The foundation grew to employ five people full-time and more than a dozen people part-time.

In 2000 Chris met Megan McClellan who was finishing her math degree at the University of Chicago.

The next year, Chris left his non-profit work to be more entrepreneurial again. And to pay off his student loans. This led to the creation of FAQ Farm in 2002, which later became WikiAnswers and then Answers.com.

In 2004 Chris and Megan moved back from Chicago to New York City. The next year, in 2005, Megan was offered a job in London and they took that opportunity to see Europe.

In 2006 Chris and Megan returned from England. They bought a home in northern Westchester County, NY.

Late that year Chris sold the WikiAnswers business. During 2007 he worked with Answers.com to integrate the site into their company. In both 2007 and 2008 WikiAnswers was the fastest growing site among the largest US websites. It became a top 25 US website with millions of visitors per day.

In 2008 Chris began work on this site, WikiTree, and has been working on it full time ever since.

Sources

• Paternal relationship is confirmed with 23andMe test matches between Chris and his father Ted showing "47.6% DNA shared across 22 segments" according to 23andMe.

• Paternal relationship is also confirmed through Y-chromosome DNA testing. Keith Whitten Sr. and Chris Whitten match on 37 out of 37 markers, as reported by Family Tree DNA. This confirms their direct paternal lines back to their MRCA Richard Whitten.

• Maternal relationship is confirmed with AncestryDNA test matches between Chris and both a grandchild ("G.C.") and great-grandchild of Havelock P. Howes. They are a second cousin once removed and a third cousin to Chris. This matches the predicted relationships reported by AncestryDNA: 3rd - 4th cousins, Confidence: Extremely High and 4th - 6th cousins, Confidence: High.

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