The fifth of seven sons born to a pioneer family, Ted Hilton's father earned his PhD from UC Berkeley at forty — with seven children in tow. That ethos of relentless learning shaped everything that followed. Ted served a two-year LDS mission in New York, then immediately enlisted in the U.S. Navy, serving on a flag cruiser in the Atlantic during World War II.
Returning home, he met Maxine — a recent arrival to the Bay Area by way of the coal mines of Wyoming — and the two graduated together from UC Berkeley. Ted built a distinguished career in personnel and organizational development, retiring as Vice President and Officer of Transamerica Corporation, then founding Anchor Industries, an electronics assembly business in Los Angeles.
An avid reader and lifelong student of religion and philosophy, Ted wrote hundreds of poems, a novel, and numerous scholarly works — including co-authored papers with his son Craig on self-networking robots, decades before the concept entered the mainstream. He spent his career building training programs rooted in a simple conviction: education is a right due every person. The Foundation bears his name in honor of that conviction.
Maxine Donnelly was born in the long-abandoned coal mining camp of Raines, Utah — the fourth child of Ruby, a school teacher, and Alton, an early union organizer who became the youngest mining superintendent in Utah. She completed high school in Kemmerer, Wyoming and enrolled at UC Berkeley to study Literature, where she met Ted. They married in June 1947 and built a life together across California, the Carolinas, and the desert Southwest.
Maxine raised four children while remaining deeply active in church and community throughout her life. She and Ted moved to Spartanburg, South Carolina in 1986, where Craig was then living. After Ted's passing in 2003, Maxine remarried family friend Don Nelson and eventually settled in Vancouver, Washington near her daughter, where she passed peacefully in 2019.
She requested no memorial service — only her children at graveside. She and Ted rest together in the National Cemetery in Vancouver, Washington. Maxine is remembered as a living example of kindness and quiet charity. Her presence is woven into everything the Foundation stands for.
Born in the Bay Area and raised in Los Angeles, Craig graduated with joint-program degrees from Occidental College (U.S. State Department program) and the California Institute of Technology in Molecular Chemistry. He founded Central Data Corporation in 1984, affiliating with Technologies B Systèmes of Paris and conducting projects across North and South America, Europe, and Africa.
Central Data created and patented technologies that preceded their categories: the first autonomous networkable robots (precursor to "swarm" systems), the first wearable biometric tracking device (precursor to the smart watch), and the first fully-integrated self-auditing accounting system. Craig also served as Principal Investigator on classified U.S. government projects, as a professor and IT Department Chair at Gateway State College (Florida), and authored a database textbook published by Addison-Wesley (Simon & Schuster).
In 2007, an online learning system Craig built grew into the foundation for the largest online learning platform in the world — still in operation today. He formed the T.C. Hilton Foundation that same year in memory of his father. Craig lives in the mountains of the Blue Ridge, serves on several private and government boards, and currently leads Cognogin — a domain-agnostic AI platform building the next generation of tools for human flourishing.