I love getting mail. But it seems like good, old-fashioned letters—especially the handwritten kind of treasures our ancestors wrote—are becoming increasingly rare.

There’s been a huge cultural shift in the way we communicate with each other during the last decade. Personally, I miss the days when the mailman brought more than catalogs and requests for money.

Still, e-mail and the likes have made it a whole lot easier and faster to communicate. I always enjoy hearing from relatives, friends, and readers like you who just don’t have the time it takes to handwrite a letter and get it to the post office.

But for people who don’t know me, my unusual name can pose a challenge. Strangers have a hard time figuring out just what kind of a person I really am. How do I know this? Because a whole lot of the mail I receive is addressed to Mr. Loretto Dennis Szucs.

It’s a natural mistake. We’ve been taught that names ending in the letter “o” are usually masculine. To compound the problem, the maiden name “Dennis” is also a first name for those of the male gender. There isn’t any help to be found in my nickname either, since my friends call me Lou—a trend started by a two-year-old nephew who couldn’t say Aunt Loretto. My husband’s Hungarian surname baffles most people even more.

I’m sure that being addressed as “Mr.” isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a girl, but the gender issue has caused a few predicaments along the way. Take, for example, the time I registered for a genealogical conference on a university campus and was assigned to an all-male dorm—with a male roommate. Then there was the time I was told that I’d either have to change the ending letter of my first name or my style of clothes if I wanted a passport to enter a foreign country.

Why, I wonder, couldn’t my parents have given me one of those regular names like Mary, or Betty, or Sue? It’s my guess that girls with those nice, feminine-sounding names don’t receive many letters addressed to “Mr.”

Maybe I should be looking at this problem in a more positive light. Should my descendants ever decide to amuse themselves by tracing their ancestors, they’re not likely to have too many problems picking my name out of a long list—that’s one advantage I have over any Mary Smith. Hopefully, however, my descendants will know enough to put my name on the lower, female line of the pedigree chart where it belongs. I sure hope they will know I was woman.

P.S. I still love getting letters. Send them to lszucs@myfamilyinc.com—and you can simply call me “Lou.”