Biographical information on

  John and Theresa Kerry

Theresa's family

José Simoess- Ferreira and Irene Theirstein

1844 - 1919

1873 - 1921

John Henry Heinz and Sarah Heim

Howard Heinz and   Elizabeth Granger Rust Heinz

1877 - 1941

Teresa Heinz Kerry is painted as an altruistic woman who came from a background of helping the poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Teresa Heinz Kerry was born with a silver spoon in her mouth and was a part of an often brutal Portuguese ruling class in Mozambique.

Heinz Kerry's father, Dr. Jose Simoes Ferreira Jr., was a tropical-disease specialist from Portugal who fell in love with Mozambique during a visit there and, after finishing his studies, decided it was the place to set up his medical practice. Her mother, Irene Thierstein, was the youngest daughter of one of the colony's wealthiest British families.

Her parents were open-minded." Heinz Kerry left Africa in 1960, after graduation, to attend the Interpreters School of the University of Geneva, where she met a young John Heinz, heir to the Heinz food fortune and a future senator. They were married in 1966.

Raema Sikanda, a nurse who worked at the cancer clinic with Heinz Kerry's father, says she remembers him leaving without any notice. "One day he was not at work. He did not say goodbye," she says.

Heinz Kerry's parents eventually settled in Portugal, where her father reopened his medical practice. He died in 1989. Her mother died in 1997 at Heinz Kerry's home in Pennsylvania.

Mozambique used forced labor until 1960. 250,000 Mozambicans work in the gold mines every year. Heinz was the African equivalent of a Southern Plantation Owner.

If anything, her father, Dr. Jose Simoes Ferreira may have been a "Marrano" or "hidden jew". Both Simoes and Ferreira are Sephardic Jewish names and they lived in Laurenco Marques, which was then one of the only Jewish populated areas of Mozambique. Many Portuguese Jews converted (became "conversos") in order to be saved from harm or death.

A small European Jewish community developed in the capital, Maputo, and in Beira, a port city on the northern coast. The Jews who settled in Mozambique were mainly merchants and businessmen who maintained very close ties with the South African Jewish community. They were literate and white in a primarily black, illiterate nation; in most respects they remained isolated.

Most Europeans in Mozambique, including almost the entire Jewish community, fled the nation on the eve of independence in 1974.

1752: Portugal announces that Mozambique is now their colony. The slave trade starts.

1787: The Portuguese raise a fort in Lourenço Marques and a town starts to develop around it.

1800's: Slaves has become a major part of trade since the late 1700's. Most slaves from Mozambique are sent to French sugar plantations in Reunion and Mauritius as well as the Portuguese plantations in Brazil. The Portuguese slave trade blooms when Great Britain bans it. Approximately 1 million slaves are shipped from Mozambique during the 1800's. Conflicts between different African groups breaks out as some tribes are hunted while other groups functions as slave traders.

1932: Portugal takes over a more direct control of the colony, and decides to cancel all agreements with the foreign trading companies. The fascists wants to get all possible profits directly to the Portuguese so-called "new state".

The Salazar government encourages primarily poor Portuguese people to immigrate to the Mozambican colony. The population grows rapidly in Mozambique, but most of the new inhabitants are only bringing even more social problems to the area.

The Portuguese government rules the colony through a racist system similar to the South African apartheid. Schools are still only for the Portuguese population. It is forbidden by law for Africans to make any kind of business and the majority are forced to hard and dangerous labour on farms, in mines and in cotton production.

Senator Henry John Heinz III, a respected Jewish senator, married her in 1966.   

Info on Heinz   

Info on Kerry

James Grant FORBES [Parents] was born on 22 Oct 1879 in Shanghai, China. He died on 24 Apr 1955 in Paris, France. He married Margaret Tyndal WINTHROP on 28 Nov 1906 in Boston, Suffolk Co., MA.

James Grant Forbes (October 22, 1879 - April 24, 1955) was born in Shanghai, China, where the Forbes family of Boston amassed a fortune from the opium trade and merchant banking after the Opium Wars. He went to school in England and graduated from Harvard University. Forbes was a successful international lawyer and banker. He married Margaret Tyndal Winthrop, who came from a family with deep roots in Massachusetts history going back to the John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The couple lived in the United States for the early years of their marriage, but after the birth of their third child they moved to Europe and made Paris, France their home. During World War I, and after having had several more children, they moved to England, where they rented Barrow Green Court. Margaret had two English governesses to help bring up her 13 children.

 

Vanessa Heinz and her step brother

Young Kerry on left

 Judicial Index