Terms of use of this website

The database is currently offline, and is likely to remain offline for the forseeable future.

The Rainwater Collection represents countless hours of genealogical and historical research by Susan Chance-Rainwater and R. Steven Rainwater, as well as the contributions of many other researchers whose names are listed in the Source and Reference page and Rainwaters on the Web page. The information on this site is copyrighted, however you may freely use it for your own genealogical research provided you adhere to the following guidelines:

• You agree to give appropriate credit for any use of material from this website that you make in a written document, genealogical database or website of your own.
• You agree not to represent our work or the work of our contributors as your own.
• You agree to include a link to our site on any genealogical web page of yours that makes use of this work.
• You agree that you will not mirror or replicate this website or the online database in its entirety.
• If you make a contribution to the Collection, it is with the understanding that once made, it cannot be withdrawn.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What happened to the database?
The database is currently offline, and is likely to remain offline for the forseeable future. Fundamentally, it violated the site's real purpose of providing uninterpreted raw data.

2. Do you have any information on my ancestor?
Possibly, but emailing this question should not be your first course of action. The website is the product of hundreds of hours of research and contains documented records of nearly every kind. Kindly be willing to take more than five minutes reviewing the information available on the website before sending this question.

3. Can I contribute to your website?
We are happy to review well documented submissions, and under many circumstances, will include the information in the database if it appears to be valid. However we make no promises about timeliness, and the final editorial judgement is ours.

Please exclude information about living minor children, for reasons of legal liability, both ours and yours. If you are unable or unwilling to do this, please don't submit anything.

4. My Grandma (or other relative) told me an old family story that your website says is a myth. Are you calling my Grandma a liar?
No, but I may believe your Grandma to be mistaken. Please refer to the essay on this topic for a more detailed answer.

5. Can I have a copy of your entire database ?
No. Be forewarned that we have shut down at least one pirated copy of the database on another website with a copyright complaint to their ISP. We don't take kindly to horse thieves, cattle rustlers and data hijackers here in Texas.

6. Why don't you have more information about Cherokee Rainwaters?
To date, no one has succeeded in proving that there are any. Claims of Cherokee lineage have so far fallen into the categories of tradition, sentimentality, loyalty to an old family story, mysticism, mythology, desire for a more multi-cultural identity and good old fashioned liberal white guilt. What's lacking is documentary evidence.

For a more detailed answer, please see the section in "Myths, Mysteries and Mistakes" entitled "My Rainwater Ancestor was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian".

For the small collection of valid information we have on Native Americans surnamed Rainwater, see the Native American Rainwater Evidence page.

7. Why do you use PNG files? Isn't JPG better?
While JPG was developed specifically for photography (JPG stands for Joint Photographic Group), it is a lossy format. This means that every time you open and resave a JPG, you are losing some of the image. Additionally, JPG does a poor job with text documents, often rendering them unprintable - or more to the point, unreadable if you print them.

PNG is a lossless format, which means that the images retain their integrity regardless of how many times the file has been opened and resaved, making it a superior format for archival documents. It's also platform-independent (unlike TIF), and has no potential patent conflicts (unlike GIF).

8. How do I view PNG and PDF files?
PNG files can be viewed using any current release web browser. If your browser software is out of date, upgrades are freely available. Click on the logo of the browser you use (found in the navigation column of this page), download and install the update.

PDF files require Adobe Reader which is freely available from the Adobe download site.

9. I sent you an email. Why didn't you answer it?
Email that is wildly ungrammatical, lacking in punctuation and/or standard capitalization (all upper case or all lower case), that uses non-standard "cute" spellings (U for you, etc.), or that simply make no sense, go unanswered. Literacy does count if you want to be taken seriously as a researcher.

10. I sent an email to someone based the email address listed on your website. The email bounced. Do you have a current address?
Clearly not. Some folks send email address updates and others don't. I can only update the addresses when I have them.

11. When I try to view a large image, my browser makes it too small to read. How do I fix this?
Internet Explorer includes a function that resizes images to fit the available space in your browser if it perceived the image to be too large. While this may be useful in some cases, it can make viewing the documents on this site rather difficult. To turn off the Internet Explorer resize function, click Tools > Internet Options > Advanced, then scroll down to Multimedia and uncheck Enable Automatic Image Resizing.

12. I am researching so-and-so. Do you have information to share?
When you consider the quantity and quality of information I am already sharing through the website, this seems a particularly specious question.

13. I am seeking a present-day relative or am adopted and seeking my natural parents. Can you help?
I don't have access to this kind of information. Such requests are better directed to Genforum

14. A piece of information - name, date, whatever - listed in one of your transcriptions is wrong in the original document. Will you please correct it?
Most emphatically, no. A transcription is a verbatim copying of an original document, mistakes and all. While I am happy to add a valid correction as a note, under no circumstances will I alter a transcription that I believe to be an accurate copy of the original.

15. Will you send me a copy of one of the documents mentioned on your website?
Where possible, we provide scans of original documents. In the case of abstracts, extracts and transcriptions printed in book form, we don't. We are not a copying service and do not provide copies from books. These books are accessible in many genealogical and public libraries, and you should seek them there. Failing this, try contacting the Genealogical Department of the Dallas Public Library for a copy.

16. Why do you have advertising on this website?
Chronography.com is simply too large to host at a freebie service like Geocities. This website is hosted at a professional hosting facility. While our expenses are nominal, Google's AdSense service provides us with a way to recover some of these costs.

Our Research Philosophy

• Our family research has been done with an emphasis on facts and data.
• We try to support every point in our genealogy with verifiable data.
• We differentiate between conjecture and fact.
• Though the contributions of others have been enormously helpful in our research, we always try to go back to the original sources.
• We test conclusions against the facts and discard them when they do not measure up.
• We do whole family genealogy as opposed to single name or straight line genealogy.
• If family myths and legends are disproved in the process of research, well, that's genealogy.
• We view genealogy as a two way street. Don't ask for information unless you are willing to give in return.
• We do not list living minor children in our online database, and ask that if you send a gedcom or other file, that you filter out all minors. This is for their safety and our liability. If you don't know how to do this, ask.
• Finally, despite all of this, we still make mistakes.

Miscellany

• This site is best viewed in 24 bit or true color, and with a current software release of your preferred web browser.
• The Adobe Acrobat plugin is required for Virtual Tombstone Tours and some documents.
• Updates for most browsers are freely downloadable and links to the major browser download sites can be reached by clicking on the browser logo in the left column menu bar.