Chris Whitten
Honor Code SignatorySigned 1 Jan 2011 | 70,508 contributions | 4,540 thank-yous | 3,450 connections
Signed 1 Jan 2011 | 70,508 contributions | 4,540 thank-yous | 3,450 connections
I'm the founder of this website, WikiTree. You can send me a private message, post a public comment here on my profile, or email me at chris@. If you have questions about WikiTree, please see our help pages instead. If you don't find your answer there, ask a question in our friendly G2G forum. We have the best genealogy community anywhere. If your question needs to be answered privately, or it's about your account, email the team at info@.
tested
Chris I. Whitten
Born 1970s.
Ancestors 
and Brother of
[private brother (1960s - unknown)]
Father of
[private daughter (2000s - unknown)]
Profile last modified
| Created 3 Jan 2008
This page has been accessed 101,927 times.
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.
Only the Trusted List can access the following:
- Chris's formal name
- full middle name (I.)
- e-mail address
- exact birthdate
- birth location
- personal memories about Chris (1)
- images (443)
- private siblings' names
- private children's names (1)
- spouse's name and marriage information
DNA Connections
It may be possible to confirm family relationships. Paternal line Y-chromosome DNA test-takers:
It may be possible to confirm family relationships. Paternal line Y-chromosome DNA test-takers:
- Chris Whitten: Family Tree DNA Y-DNA Test 67 markers, haplogroup R-M269, FTDNA kit #124309, MitoYDNA ID T10467 [compare]
- Keith Whitten
:
Family Tree DNA Y-DNA Test 37 markers, haplogroup R-M269, FTDNA kit #502535
- Chris Whitten: Family Tree DNA mtDNA Test HVR1, haplogroup U5, FTDNA kit #124309, MitoYDNA ID T10468 [compare]
-
100.00%
100.00%
Chris Whitten:
23andMe, yourDNAportal CHR61965ed9, Genomelink CBBIDwBmvAGS
+
AncestryDNA, GEDmatch A820770 [compare] [compare x], Ancestry member ciwhitten
+
Family Tree DNA Family Finder, FTDNA kit #330041
+
Living DNA
-
50.00%
Ted (Whitten) Whittenkraus :
23andMe, GEDmatch M811699 [compare]
-
~12.50%
~25.00%
Barbara (Oldford) Waldroup :
Family Tree DNA Family Finder, GEDmatch T349319 [compare] [compare x], FTDNA kit #567696
-
~6.25%
Paula Degree :
23andMe
-
~6.25%
Susan (Bartlett) Hamill :
23andMe
-
~3.12%
Jennifer (Hamill) Andreas :
23andMe
-
~3.12%
Stephanie (Hamill) Goff :
23andMe
-
~3.12%
James Hamill :
23andMe
-
~3.12%
Hollis Bartlett :
AncestryDNA, Ancestry member hbartlett72814
-
~1.56%
Glenn Legge :
23andMe
-
~1.56%
D (X) LX :
AncestryDNA, Ancestry member twogorb
-
~0.78%
Dawn (Greenman) Walker :
23andMe, GEDmatch BP7949964 [compare], yourDNAportal DAW86669ca4
+
AncestryDNA, GEDmatch EB4206525 [compare], yourDNAportal DAW2822edcc, Ancestry member dawncherie64
-
~0.78%
Amy (Sousa) Dickens :
AncestryDNA, Ancestry member marshed214
-
~0.78%
Robin (Joslin) Gariepy :
AncestryDNA, Ancestry member aphrod1016
Genealogist-to-Genealogist (G2G) Forum posts about Chris:
- Chris Whitten is an Amazingly Wonderful Wikitreer!!!! May 23, 2022.
- Chris Whitten is a Wonderful WikiTreer Aug 25, 2021.
- Chris Whitten is the most wonderful WikiTreer ever!! Mar 2, 2021.
- Chris Whitten is a Wonderful WikiTreer Nov 7, 2020.
- Chris Whitten is a Wonderful WikiTreer Aug 25, 2020.
- Appreciation to Chris Whitten Jun 21, 2020.
This week's featured connections are EGOT winners: Chris is 19 degrees from James Earl Jones, 29 degrees from Mel Brooks, 44 degrees from Viola Davis, 23 degrees from John Gielgud, 22 degrees from Audrey Hepburn, 32 degrees from Reginald Dwight, 22 degrees from Quincy Jones, 27 degrees from John Legend, 21 degrees from Andrew Lloyd Webber, 26 degrees from Mike Nichols, 27 degrees from Richard Rodgers and 18 degrees from Barbra Streisand on our single family tree. Login to see how you relate to 33 million family members.
Categories: WikiTree Team | Fitchburg, Massachusetts
I was just looking at Schneringer-8. You appear to be amazing contributor. Profiles don't get much better than that.
Thank you for Wikitree, LOVE IT! Brooke Kidd-Baker
edited by Brooke (Kidd) Kidd-Baker
edited by N Lamb
Thank you again for your kind words, encouragement and especially for my award.
Have a wonderful weekend, Kimberly
Thanks for creating the site. I wanted to let you know that my starting this geneology search has already allowed me to re-connect with two people from my past. One, my son, wants to collaborate on this project with me. He has already done a TON of research and taken the Wilson branch back seven generations.
Thanks again for this NICE surprise!
edited by [Living Brunson]
https://archive.nytimes.com/wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/bakers-accessory/
http://www.crosswordfan.com/word/wookieepedia
edited by Steven Greenwood
Thank you so much for WikiTree. Hope (Tillman-416)
Thank you for developing Wikitree!! It is definitely a source of enjoyment for me as I work on my family tree. I found you as i was working on DNA confirmation. I want to get the hang of confirming and posting the confirmation. As I was working through the example, I found my way to your profile and b4 I realized you were the "Head Honcho", I checked to see if we were related, and YES. we are! 11th Cousins. It is official now, you definitely have one and probably many more Southern Cousins. Thank you so much for all the resources on this site and the camaraderie established with the process. Congrats on a job well done! Your Cuz, Jenny Capell-224 Campbell
Sincerely, your newest 12th or 13th (we've got a few paths) cousin! :)
Chris
James Boone
Your response to a question brought me here to your profile. Laissez Faire Books looked very familiar. I see that it was before "the web" about four years into my online experience (starting with Prodigy, then access at university not long after).
I haven't done much investigating of relationships with fellow Wikitreers except a friend, and someone I don't know. Was surprise to be related both times. So I checked at your page too. Uh huh. Related distantly - 11th cousins through our mothers, via two daughters of Matthew Marvin.
I think I must check relationships with Wikitreers more often, lol. Don't have DNA results to post yet or would have probably done more investigating of connections. It is always surprising and interesting to connect to contemporaries, and people from the past!
Best of all I thrive on doing the online research to find documentation - and love contributing to Wikitree in every way I can. It is a blessing to have so many people in one collaborative space who are willing and able to create the quality we all want to see throughout Wikitree.
Again, thanks for being you; doing what you do.
And, once more, we are non-cousins!
Does DNAportal replace GEDmatch? Does it do LivingDNA data?
One neat thing about GEDmatch is that it processed a couple of DNA merge files I built using DNAkitstudio to merge ancestry and LivingDNA data.
I thought LivingDna being an oddball from others could offer wider coverage, but that has drawbacks. One disappointing thing about myheritage is that when I originally signed up they offered livingDNA uploads. They made excuses for many months saying just wait a few weeks then after about 6 months they said it was no longer supported.
I liked livingDNA because of their abbreviated Y and mtDNA at no extra cost. Two of my major brickwalls involved my Y and mtDNA lines, but neither Y nor mtDNA has been useful. My paternal line brickwall was breached via autosomal matches involving illegitimacy. My mtDNA is only 2% or less of Ireland population, but that has not helped yet.
WikiTree is an amazing site, though I'm still a newbie, there is so much information here to learn from! Thanks so much!!
Denise
Thanks for all the work you accomplished during our Connect-A-Thon 2020. It is amazing how many more profiles were created and added to our Shared Tree. You have every right to be pleased with your efforts!
And while I am here, allow me to also thank you for your leadership.
Kind regards,
Pippin Sheppard ~ WikiTree’s Appreciation Team
Chris and Greta are 11th cousins. Chris Whitten and Greta Moody are both descendants of William Allen.
Just wanted to let you know that I am really enjoying the new member greeting processes! Not only is it easier for guests and new members but it makes the job of greeter even better. The info that new members add to their profiles helps us greeters to tailor our message and point the new member in the direction of info and tips that our customized to their interests!
Thanks for helping to bring in this improvement!
Peggy W ~ WikiTree Greeter
edited by [Living Wood]
I would like to thank you for WikiTree. It is such an innovative concept. I have been using it for over two years, and certainly appreciate all the planning and work involved in its creation. Great idea! Thank you, so much! Regards, Ali
John Williams ~ WikiTree Greeter
edited by [Living Williams]
Thank you, Dorothy Mathis Vance (Mathis-410)
Thanks so very much for your participation in the spring Clean-a-thon! Every suggestion you cleared (over 300!) made our Tree that much better. The WikiTree community appreciates YOU!
Pip Sheppard WikiTree’s Appreciation Team
We are 8th cousins through Henry Baldwin of Woburn. I cleaned up his profile about 2 months ago and am working on tracing the FTDNA Baldwin name back to common ancestor Richard Baldwin. My colleagues and I hope to get this published and then add the Connecticut and Massachusetts lines back to Aston-Clinton. Thanks for all you do. Carol (Baldwin-3428)
My Late husband Walter Pack and you are
Walter and Chris are 13th cousins once removed sharing the same great grandparent Thomas Wright. Amazing.
edited by Andrea (Stawski) Pack
The Appreciate Team THANKS YOU!
Pippin Sheppard Appreciation Team Member
Henry Cobb 1607 is my 10th great grandfather, so we are 11th cousins. I have tested with Ancestry, and 23andMe. I have a tree in the works in Ancestry...The Richard Carlton Jackson Family Tree. It is definitely a tree in the works as I was not raised by my bio dad and he never knew who his father was and there was a slight question of who his mother was...my DNA proved that. Thank you for this site!
We're 10th cousins, once removed via Mary Rainsford among others! We share Alden/Mullins DNA too! Kelly (Holtz) Stamper (Holtz-78)
My Whitten line is from Pennsylvania I think. I'm having a hard time finding the parents of my 3rd great-grandfather, Joseph Whitten of Oil City, PA. If you have any knowledge of my line I'd love to hear it!
On behalf of the Connectors Project Leaders, we are doing a six-month check-in with members. Please let us know if you are still active. If you are active, please let us know in which ways you are currently contributing to the project.
All of us at WikiTree would like to thank you for your contributions and hope that you are enjoying exploring your roots.
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Michelle ~ Volunteer Coordinator