> ... before discovering my name is actually spelled Emile on my birth certificate. I stopped even trying for Émile at that point.
Diactrics on uppercase letters weren't that common before: they were officially supposed to be there on uppercase characters but:
- old french typewriters didn't have them (they had the lowercase é, è, à etc. though)
- people using early computers had no idea how to encode them at all (but é, è, à etc. were on the keyboard) [1]
But "ATTENTION MARCHE" and "ATTENTION MARCHÉ" are two very different things. It's simply wrong to use the first one if you meant the second and vice versa.
Now I know a friend who lives in the US and who simply dropped the diacritic from its family name: so now he and his kids have a "different" family name than his family in Europe.
He found it easier that way.
[1] People using Word in the early nineties had to type 'é' and then select that character and go to a menu to transform it to uppercase, because "shift+é" would enter the digit '2'.