It Was Always in the Name
My father sent me a text this week.
He had been looking up surnames, the way you do when you have a few minutes and a curious mind, and landed on ours. Heximer. He sent me what he found, the way you’d share something mildly interesting, not expecting it to stop me in my tracks.
It stopped me in my tracks.
I’ve known for as long as I can remember that our name carried something. Growing up, my dad would joke that we came from witches and warlocks; our name begins with “hex”, after all, and that was enough for a child who loved Halloween to find it thrilling. I filed it away as family mythology. The kind of story you tell without knowing whether it’s true.
It’s true.
What the name actually means
Heximer is a variation of the German surname Hexamer. At its root is the Middle High German word Hexe - witch. Sorceress. But, not in the way most people mean it.
The Hexenmeister, the one who does the work of the Hexe, was the village healer. The keeper of earth wisdom. The person who understood plants and rememedies and the things that lived at the edge of what ordinary knowledge could explain. A benevolent force in any Germanic village, the one people turned to when conventional methods failed.
The suffix, the -er, means “one who does.” Someone connected to this practice. Someone from this lineage.
Heximer. One connected to the work of healing, of earth wisdom, of things that live at the threshold between the seen and the unseen.
It goes even deeper than that.
The word Hexe itself traces back through Old High German to a word that means hagazussa, literally, “hedge-rider.” Someone who moves between worlds. Who lives at the threshold between the ordinary and the otherworldly. Who crosses the boundary between what is visible and what is not.
I write about women who carry ancient knowledge forward across centuries without fully understanding why they carry it. I write about the things that get buried and resurface anyway. I write about the threshold between past and present, between what is known and what is only sensed.
My name, it turns out, has been writing about the same things all along.
The timing that isn’t a coincidence
The surname Hexamer originated in the late 16th or early 17th century. In Germany. During the precise historical period when the people who held this kind of knowledge - the healers, the herbalists, the ones who understood things others didn’t - were being systematically persecuted for it.
The Harbinger is set in 1563. In England. During the same era.
The women in that book were those who knew things they weren’t supposed to know. Who carried wisdom that made the world around them uncomfortable. Who paid a price for what they understood.
I didn’t know when I started writing that story that it was also, in some sense, my family’s story. That the name on the cover was a thread connecting me to the very history I was writing about.
What I haven’t found yet
I am a genealogy enthusiast. I have studied my family lines and a genuine love for origin points; for tracing the thread backward and finding out where things began and why. It’s part of why I write the books I write. The past is always more interesting than the official version suggests.
What I haven’t been able to find yet is the specific family lore that should exist somewhere in that history. If there were stories, and I believe there were, they didn’t survive the migration, the spelling shifts, the generations of not asking the right questions before the people who knew were gone.
That loss is its own kind of grief. The stories that didn’t make it forward.
But the name made it. The name is still here. It has been telling its own story all along, in the way that names do; quietly, persistently, waiting for someone to finally look it up.
My father sent me a text this week.
It was always in the name.
