page 18, the Halberstam commission
a sample page
This is what one of your booklet's name pages looks like, taken from a sample commission for the Halberstam family. Your booklet will be composed for your family, in the serif you pick at intake, with chapters titled for what you described.
names from your grandmother's side, slightly modernized
We kept your description of her accent — the long vowels, the patient consonants — and built this chapter around names that sit comfortably in that mouth.
Edith
EE-dith
Old Englishfrom Old English ēad (riches, blessedness) + gȳð (war).
An Edith arrives at school three minutes early and shares her ruler without making a thing of it.
Your grandmother's mother was Edith Marwood; we kept the shape.
- Edith Wallace, a schoolteacher in Pasadena, CA, 1923.
- Edith Mwangi, a midwife in Mombasa, 1948.
- Edith Forsyth, a mining engineer in Sudbury, ON, 1937.
Linnea
lih-NAY-ah
Swedishfor the twinflower, after Carl Linnaeus, who loved it best.
A Linnea will know the names of the trees on her street, and the names of their diseases, and refuse to pick the early blossoms.
- Linnea Eklund, a apiarist in Småland, SE, 1933.
- Linnea Salgado, a piano teacher in Curitiba, 1955.
- Linnea Hartwig, a midwife in Hamburg, 1922.