Personal and Family Matters

Bill Silvert is married to Maria Emília de Freitas Mota e Cunha, a Portuguese scientist working at INIAP-IPIMAR, the national fisheries laboratory (formerly the Instituto de Investigação das Pescas e do Mar) in Lisbon. They were married on 5 July 1997 in Lisbon, Portugal. She is currently working at the aquaculture centre in Olhão and they live in the Algarve far from Lison's traffic jams.

Their wedding was wonderful, with singing and dancing  and afterwards the happy couple went off together on a pleasant honeymoon.

For complicated reasons that made it impossible to get a Portuguese wedding license, the wedding in Portugal was not official, and they were legally married in Gibraltar on 9 July 1997.

His mother, Vicki Oppenheimer, was a well-known writer whose major interest was the history and anthropology of food. She has published two books, On the Nature of Food and The Taste Makers: How New World Foods came to Old World Kitchens, which was published when she was 96! She spent the last years of her life with us and died in 2007 at the age of 99. She is buried in the cemetary of São Brás de Alportel, Portugal.

His late step-father, Armand Oppenheimer, was also well-known as an environmentalist and anthropologist, and a Web site has been developed to record his ideas, his writings, and his photographs for future generations.

Bill has two children, Richard born in 1970 and Rebecca in 1973.

Bill's son Richard divides his time between a passion for woodworking and entrepreneurial talents. He completed a two-year course in Furniture and Woodworking Technology at the Nova Scotia Community College in Sidney, Cape Breton. He now owns an interesting shop called Third Eye Blind in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. The shop carries an unusual collection of novelty items as well as gaming supplies, and often hosts gaming competitions in the back room. He is able to keep his family supplied with curious objects which we would never be able to find on our own - for example, his father is the owner of a prized pet, a Norwegian Blue Parrot, which is extremely difficult to find in local pet shops (they are not in great demand since they tend to sleep a lot).

Rebecca (or Rivka or Becka as she is also known) is a great fan of university, having attended seven institutions in ten years including Dalhousie University, McGill University, University of St. Petersburg (in Russia, not Florida), and University of Ottawa. Along the way she has managed to collect B.A.'s in Russian Studies and Linguistics, receiving the University medal in Linguistics at Dalhousie in 2001.

She completed a Master's degree in Sociolinguistics at the University of Ottawa focussing on Optimality Theory, Phonology and Variationist Sociolinguistics. In addition to her studies, she was employed as a research assistant at the Sociolinguistics laboratory at the University of Ottawa.

After completing her Master's degree in Sociolinguistics she worked in Market research for Ipsos-Direct. She left there and moved to Montréal where the lights burn brighter than in Ottawa. Recently she moved back to Halifax with her wonderful cats, Noah and Frodo, and a boyfriend named Josh.

In her leisure time she enjoys writing fiction and surfing the internet.

Bill's older brother Tony Oppenheimer died in the fall of 2005. He had retired from the S. Cal. Kaiser Permanente Medical Group in Los Angeles several years before. He had a distinguished career as a physician specialised in respiratory illnesses, and although retired he remained active to the end of his life. His wife Valerie, also retired, remains active in her field of demography and still has an office at U.C.L.A.

His younger brother, John Oppenheimer, is on the faculty of the Center for Environmental Science at the College of Staten Island, which is part of C.U.N.Y. He is married to Ana Paula de Morais, an Angolan physician involved with public health issues. By one of those amazing coincidences that have absolutely nothing to do with family reunions, Ana Paula (a.k.a. Bá) is a cousin of Bill's wife! The two marriages have brought some beautiful women into their lives, as can be seen by this photograph showing Bá's two daughters Mona and Wel, Bill's wife Mi, and John's wife Bá (click on the photo to see a larger version, suitable for framing!). John had to become an expert on real estate law and construction, as he successfully (but stressfully) completed the negotiations necessary to move to a larger house that could accommodate his expanded family. The house is what is known as a "handyman's special", but when he is finished (sometime in the next millenium or so) it will be a palace!

Developed and maintained by William Silvert.