If it's pure silver, it's fine. Silver isn't toxic. Well...if you get some colloidial silver, and you dose yourself with it every day, you'll have some disturbing symptoms. The same is true of almost all metals. Iron pills, for example, are worse, but we commonly cook with cast iron. Metallic silver is sometimes used as a chelating agent, so it can purge your body of other metals you may have absorbed.
If its heirloom electroplated silver, it's probably still fine. If it's heirloom pewter, coated in copper, then electroplated with silver, its still fine (because pewter doesn't tarnish, so the tarnish is either silver or copper) but I wouldn't eat anything acidic with it, because it'll leech lead into your food.
Note : There is no way you have pewter. That was a joke.
An answer to your edited points.
Number 4. Pores don't do much during cooking. It is about cell walls and proteins. A pore is a channel constructed from zillions of cells (like a tunnel constructed from bricks). A cell is like a bubble (the cell wall) filled with liquid (the cell plasma). The cell wall is made from zillions of proteins, like a hat knitted from wool. In freezing, the plasma turns to sharp ice crystals and tears the cell walls apart (like poking holes in a hat).
Then under heat, the proteins unravel the way you could unravel a knitted hat if you tugged at it. If you cook the meat just a little, the proteins remain bushy and soak up liquid. If you overcook it, they stretch and start looking like a long, smooth thread and can't soak up water and/or cell plasma any more. The meat tastes dry and unpleasant.
Freezing the meat is just bursting the cell walls. Unravelling the proteins is denaturation. They are two different things.
Number 1. More water does indeed mean more damage to the cell walls. No denaturation happens there, as explained above. But you can't change the amount of water within the chicken cells in any way while it lives. This amount self-regulates, like blood pressure. If you feed the chicken more water, it will excrete more water, not store it in its cells.
Number 2. You want lots of air around the chicken if you want to get ice crystals buildup on its surface. That's why Sobachatina suggested an inflated bag - to keep air around it. Also, unpacked chicken will make your freezer dirty and contaminate other food with uncooked meat juices, which is dangerous.
Number 3. As far as I know, water ice expands while cooling from 0 to -4°C and then starts shrinking. Most damage is done while the crystals expand, so I suppose that most of the damage will be completed within the first 1-2 days (depending on how long it takes for the complete chicken to cool to -4°C).
Best Answer
Ice formation is damaging to most tissues (and sometimes fat crystals to milk fat globules), so if uncooked produce thaws I'd imagine it's more vulnerable than before to mold/bacterial intrusion within the fridge. If there's cycling, then maybe some food will perish quicker and emulsions break.