Kerry's family history and that of his current wife.

Randy Black sends this information on Senator John Kerry and his wife: "It turns out that the John Kerry’s family WAS Jewish, but covered it up when they immigrated. I ran across the following while researching the current Mrs. Kerry:
Kerry's paternal grandfather, Frederick A. Kerry (born Fritz Kohn), was born in the town of Horni Benesov, in what is now Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic, and grew up in Mödling (a small town near Vienna, Austria). He immigrated to the U.S. arriving at Ellis Island with his wife Ida (née Loewe, who was born in Budapest, Hungary) and son Erich on May 18, 1905. In Illinois, Mildred was born (c. 1910) and in Massachusetts, Richard was born (c. 1916). The Kerry-Kohns were Jewish, but the family concealed its background upon migrating to the United States, and raised the Kerry children as Catholics. A Czech historian has shown that Ida is a descendant of Sinai Loew, one of three older brothers of Rabbi Judah Loew (1525-August 22, 1609), a famous Kabbalist, philosopher and talmudist known as the Maharal of Prague. Two of Ida's siblings, Otto Loewe and Jenni Loewe, died in the Nazi concentration camps (Theresienstadt and Treblinka, respectively), after being deported from Vienna in 1942, about a year before John Kerry's birth. Frederick committed suicide on November 23, 1921, by gunshot to the head at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. His second son, Richard, was only six at the time.

Richard John Kerry, John's father, attended Phillips Academy as a youth, and then graduated from Yale University in 1937. He received a degree from Harvard Law School in 1940, and then joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. In his adult career, he worked for the Foreign Service and served as an attorney for the Bureau of United Nations Affairs in the U.S. Department of State. It was in 1937, while taking a course in sculpture in the French coastal town of Saint-Brieucm that Richard Kerry met Rosemary Forbes, who was born in Paris, France, into the wealthy Forbes family of China and Boston at the Forbes Saint-Brieuc estate. One of eleven children, she studied to be a nurse, and served in the Red Cross in Paris during World War II. She would stand to inherit (in 2004 dollars) approximately $20 million to 40 million from her father and the Forbes family. The couple married in Montgomery, Ala., in January 1941.

John Kerry's maternal grandfather, James Grant Forbes, was born in Shanghai, China, where the Forbes family of China and Boston accumulated a fortune in the opium and China trade, and became an international businessman and attorney living in France and England. With their wealth acquired from the opium and China trade, later invested in railroad and industrial ventures in the U.S., the Forbeses settled in Boston and France, acquiring an estate at Saint-Brieuc and another estate on Naushon Island off Cape Cod. John Kerry's maternal grandmother, Margaret Tyndal Winthrop, came from a family with deep roots in Massachusetts history, and was raised in Boston. Her grandfather was Robert Charles Winthrop, the conservative Whig Speaker of the House and a senator, and her ancestors include James Bowdoin, former governor of Maine, and John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Other notable figures in this branch of Kerry's family tree are Franklin Roosevelt, Jane Addams, Calvin Coolidge, and ironically, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.
Source: http://www.worldhistory.com/wiki/J/John-Kerry.htm

Kerry and his first wife, Julia Thorne (were married in 1970 but  separated in 1982 and divorced July 25, 1988. "After 14 years as a political wife," she wrote in A Change of Heart, her book about depression, "I associated politics only with anger, fear and loneliness." The marriage was formally annulled by the Roman Catholic Church in 1997. Thorne later married an architect named Richard Charlesworth, and moved to Bozeman, Mont., where she became active in local environmental groups such as the Greater Yellowstone Coalition.
Source: http://www.worldhistory.com/wiki/J/John-Kerry.htm

Teresa Heinz Kerry (born October 5, 1938), is a philanthropist and the wife of United States Presidential candidate Senator John Kerry. Born Teresa Simões-Ferreira in Mozambique, which is a former colony of Portugal, the future Mrs. Kerry studied at various places in Africa, including South Africa, before moving to the United States to work at the United Nations as a translator. She speaks five languages. It is said that she was a colleague of Madeleine Albright, the former United States Secretary of State.  Heinz Kerry currently manages several Heinz foundations, disbursing money to various social and environmental causes. She laudably assists the community of Pittsburgh, where the Heinz family has had so many financial and family connections. It is believed that she became a United States citizen in the Sixties after her marriage to Sen. Heinz, presumably after she retired from her United Nations translator job, since she claims to have voted for the first time for President in the 1972 election between Richard Nixon and George McGovern.
Heinz Kerry is the life estate beneficiary or outright beneficiary of her husband's trusts, making her either extremely wealthy in her own name, or powerful as a trustee of Heinz family wealth. Sen. Kerry is wealthy in his own name, though not to the same degree, since he became a trust fund beneficiary of his mother's and Forbes family trusts.
Presumably because Sen. Heinz was a Republican, his widow was a registered Republican for most of her voting career. In the past year or so, she changed her registration to Democrat. It is unknown what registration her sons hold, or if and when they also changed registrations.

Teresa Heinz Kerry and her husband are good friends with Arizona Representative Ed Pastor. She had three sons with Heinz: John Heinz, Jr., André Heinz and Christopher Heinz. To date, she has refused to disclose her personal tax returns citing family trusts and privacy, though the spouse of VP candidate Ferraro ultimately was convinced to release his returns. The criticism stems from questions about the sources of Sen. Kerry's spending, his first wife, second wife, or mother's trusts. Kerry and Teresa Simões-Ferreira Heinz, the widow of Pennsylvania Sen. H. John Heinz III (R-Pa.) and formerly a United Nations translator, met at the U.N.-sponsored Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in 1992. They married on May 26, 1995, in Nantucket, Mass. Teresa has three sons from her previous marriage: John Heinz Jr., André Heinz, and Christopher Heinz (b. ~1973).

Today, the combined net worth of the Kerry-Heinz fortune is reported to be between $199 million and $839 million, making Kerry the wealthiest U.S. senator.  Sen. Kerry is wealthy in his own name, and is the beneficiary of at least four trusts inherited from Forbes family members, including his mother, who died in 2002. By the way: Before they married, Teresa Heinz, five years older than John, who was in his fifties, made Kerry sign a prenuptial agreement. Which begs the question: If his own wife doesn't trust him with her money, why should we trust him with ours?  Kerry’s first wife is said to have been worth more than $100 million at the time of their marriage.  It would seem that Mr. Kerry gravitates toward the super wealthy women of the country in order to finance his political career and to provide him with multiple mansions to live in.  I find it astonishingly disingenuous that the Democrats for years have portrayed Republic candidates as less then worthy of election due to their perceived inherited wealth, but now seem to have amnesia about those matters".

RH: As I reported. the wealth of Mrs. kerry is now said to have grown to $1 billion.