Digital Editions are exact electronic copies. Sometimes, formatting has been changed to improve readability, but the pagination of the original has been preserved and all images (portraits, crests, charts, etc.) are included.

A digital (electronic) edition has distinct advantages over a facsimile edition or its hard-copy equivalent -- not the least of which is the ability to transport text and images into your own database or family history. You can also search electronic files by key word using your word processing software.  This feature is especially valuable for volumes that have not been indexed. Electronic editions are also often more legible than their hard-copy sources.

These "Digital Editions" are not the kind of thing Broderbund (Family Tree Maker) produces, which requires special software to access; nor are they Adobe-based page images, which are little better, and often more cumbersome to use, than books.  They are fully electronic texts that can be accessed by your own word processing software, with illustrations in JPEG and GIF format that you can edit with any number of image viewers.

A Digital Edition is produced by scanning the text of a book and running it through optical character recognition (OCR) software. Images are scanned separately and saved in distinct files. The text is then "proofed" to eliminate OCR errors and put in an appropriate (and hopefully pleasing) format. Enhancements are then created, which typically include intergenerational hyperlinks (a click of the mouse allows you to jump instantly from one family to the family of a child, and back again) and hyperlinks from text to images. Hyperlinks in a large genealogy (such as Huntington) number in the thousands. CD copies of Digital Edition genealogies are produced and shipped  on demand, usually within a day or two of receiving an order.

In summary then:
Cost: Reprinted hard-copy versions of classic genealogies (available, for example, from Higginson Book Company) typically cost ten to fifteen cents a page, plus shipping. The original publications, if they can be found at all, are typically much more expensive. Digital Edition products sell for about three cents a page (plus $15.00 per CD for media, packaging, postage, and insurance).

Quality: The publications of the Higginson Book Company are typically copies of copies. The readability of the text is inferior to the original, and the images are very poor. A Digital Edition is as readable as anything you can produce on your own computer, and the images are as good as their originals. Reproductions offered by the Genealogical Publishing Company (GPC) and Heritage Books are better than Higginson's, and often less expensive, but not nearly as good or as versatile as a Digital Edition. GPC and Heritage also offer publications on CD, but these can be accessed only through Adobe Acrobat or Broderbund software, which do not have the power of your word processing software.

Versatility: With Digital Editions, you can use all the tools of your word processing software. You can copy text verbatim into your own data base, file and edit it, and re-arrange it at your leisure. If the print is too small or too large for comfortable viewing you can resize it using your software's "zoom" function. If you get tired of reading black on white, you can change the color of the background and the font. And you can use your software's "search" utility to find people, places, events, dates, or anything else you might want.

Indexes: The ability to search a text for a word, a phrase, or a symbol is, by itself, worth the cost of the product. Even if a publication has an index, the search capability is invaluable. In the indexes of most genealogies, you'll find only the names of people. But suppose you want to find out if any of them were born in Blackfoot, Idaho, for example, or suppose you want to discover which of them served in the civil war. For these kinds of things, you need the search capability afforded by a Digital Edition.

Images: In most Digital Editions (the Churchill genealogy is an exception), the original illustrations are reproduced as high resolution JPEG images. Most of these images can be enlarged to fill your computer screen without significant loss of detail. You can print them, if you want. You can copy them into your own data base or text file. You can edit them.

Enhancements: The font or format of the original is not copied exactly, but is used as a guide and the pagination is always preserved (except in indexes, where citing the page number is not usually an issue). Usually, however, the format that is adopted (it's different for each publication) makes a Digital Edition more readable than the original publication. The images are published in separate files to keep the text files of manageable size. Spelling errors of the original are not corrected (though the temptation is great!), but discrepancies are noted -- just so you'll know that the errors or discrepancies are the author's doing! The enhancement that are especially valuable consist of hyperlinks -- hyperlinks from text to images; hyperlinks from tables of contents to designated text locations; and "intergenerational" hyperlinks. With hyperlinks, you can get from one place to another in a Digital Edition more quickly and more efficiently than you could with a paper-based book.

Digital Editions are delivered by first class mail  on Compact Disk.  Text files are in Rich Text Format (RTF); image files are in JPEG, GIF, and/or TIFF format.  Each disk holds any number of volumes, up to 540 Mb.

CD System requirements:  CDs from Digital Editions work with all the major operating systems  -- Windows, DOS, and MAC.   You will also need word processing software that can handle Rich Text Format  (most of them do) and an image viewer that can handle files in JPEG, GIF, and TIFF formats.

List of Digital Edition Products and prices of the books.

Willard Memoir: Life and Times of Major Simon Willard, with Notices of Three Generations of His Descendants and Two Collateral Branches in the United States; Also Some Account of the Name and Family in Europe from an Early Day, by Joseph Willard (Boston, Little, Brown, and Company, 1913).  xvi + 471 pages, with an index (16 pages) and six images. Digital Edition © August 2001.

The 1913 edition, from which this Digital Edition was produced, is a word-for-word reprint of the 1858 edition, to which the editors appended a one page transcript of English wills, originally published by the Essex Institute in 1879.

As the title suggests, this volume focuses upon the life of Simon Willard, who immigrated to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634, together with his brother George, his sister Margery, and his brother-in-law, Dolor Davis.  It includes, however, discussions of: (1) the origins of the name and its presence in Sussex and Kent Counties (80 pages), (2) Willards in the U. S. not descended from Simon's father (17 pages), (3) the lives of George and Margery (13 pages), and the lives of his male descendants through the fourth generation (76 pages).

Table of Contents

The Digital Edition:  Complete, with two text files in Rich Text Format (1.3 Mb) and six images in JPEG and GIF format (1.0 Mb).

Enhancements: Hyperlinks from the Table of Contents to text, and hyperlinks to images.  As with all other Digital Editions, the index of the Willard Memoir is published in a separate file: it can be loaded concurrently with the text file for side-by-side comparison.

Price $29.00