Teresa Heinz Kerry

Teresa Heinz (born Maria Teresa Thierstein Simões-Ferreira; October 5, 1938), also known as Teresa Heinz Kerry, is an American businesswoman and philanthropist. Heinz is the widow of former U.S. Senator John Heinz and the current wife of United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, longtime U.S. Senator, and 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. Heinz is Chair of the Heinz Endowments and the Heinz Family Philanthropies. Early life Maria Teresa Thierstein Simões-Ferreira was born in the city of Lourenço Marques (later renamed Maputo) in the east African colony of Portuguese Mozambique, which later became the nation of Mozambique. Her parents were José Simões-Ferreira, Jr., a Portuguese-born oncologist and tropical disease specialist, and Irene Thierstein, a Portuguese and British national. Irene Thierstein's father was the scion of a Swiss-German family living in Malta, and her mother was the half-French, half-Italian daughter of an Alexandrian shipowner who traded with Russia during the Crimean War; both emigrated to Portuguese East Africa. In 1960, Simões-Ferreira earned a Bachelor of Arts in Romance Languages and Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. In 1963, she graduated from the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Geneva and moved to the United States to be an interpreter at the United Nations. Marriages, children, and personal life On February 5, 1966, at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania's gothic Heinz Chapel on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh, Simões-Ferreira married future U.S. Senator John Heinz, an heir to the H. J. Heinz Company. In 1971, Teresa Heinz became a naturalized United States citizen. The couple had three sons: Henry John Heinz IV (born November 4, 1966) André Thierstein Heinz (born December 9, 1969) Christopher Drake Heinz (born March 20, 1973)