I see no mention of family beyond siblings. Was he not married/in a relationship? I realize some people don't want that, but it's always made me sad even so.
He reportedly was never in a relationship. This comes from unidentified members of the Ritchie family who set up a web site focussed mostly on his unpublished PhD thesis. The site includes some personal information on his life.
"In his adult years Dennis had a reputation for being famously private.... There were topics that were completely off limits with Dennis – mostly having to do with any form of personal intimacy. This was true for his Bell Labs colleagues, who speak of Dennis’ personal life as a kind of private zone where they do not tread, and true with his siblings also. This was just his way.
"As an adult, Dennis lived an ascetic lifestyle. In September 1967, he moved back into the attic of his family home and set up a home office in the basement, where he lived with his parents until 1989. He worked from 1PM until 3AM six days a week, Sundays off for reading. He had no friends outside of his business colleagues, he rarely socialized, he did not have (nor never had) a relationship with anyone, he wouldn’t talk about/acknowledge discussion about emotional issues in any form. (He did have a wonderful family who loved him dearly and whom he loved dearly as well.) It was almost as if he needed to blot out any awareness of his personal life from the world by using the strategy of having no personal life to be observed.
"This affect wasn’t just something neutral, it could be an active force."
I should add, on the same page, there is an excerpt of an interview with his sister Lynn who set Dennis up with a friend for her junior prom. So he at least dated.
More broadly:
"As a youth Dennis was social and outgoing, then in young adulthood he transformed quite rapidly to become more private and anti-social. Hard to pin down exactly when this would have been happening… except that clues from John and Lynn’s interviews suggest perhaps sometime around February 1968 might be central."
It does make me sad, because I know a lot of people who shelter themselves in computers, always wanting something more out in the real world but never being able to get their comfort zone wide enough to achieve it.
