The È... comes from French surnames and our French developer wants to group all versions 
of E together. The É... can be found in French surnames in Sweden as well as in Germany.
The program, GRAMPS is a genealogy program used in about 20 languages, so there is no 
preferred language.

I know. However, Swedish telephone books and dictionaries are sorted the same:
A,B,C... X,Y,Z,Å,Ä,Ö.

True. I agree. 
GRAMPS runs in the locale of the user, but must be able to handle information coming from 
many other languages/countries. That's why it's hard to be universal.

We can have them in names. See above.

I think we have found a solution that can handle most cases.
We treat surnames beginning with "ÅÄÖ" special. I don't think that there are many surnames 
outside the Nordic countries that starts with any of these three letters.

Vielen dank!

/Peter