When you arrive on Sunday, feel free to park in any lot on campus. A campus map will be included in your course materials, and as you pick up your course materials please be sure to get a Visitor's Parking Pass to put on the dashboard of your car. You may park in all lots during the hours of 7:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. except those lots designated for Faculty/Staff. After 4:30, you may once again park in any parking lot.

If you are staying in campus housing, please leave your vehicle parked in your residence hall parking lot during the hours of 7:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. if possible.

Unfortunately, IGHR does not provide transportation to and from the airport. However, our air travelers have a few options from which to choose:

• Due to unstable gas prices, we are unable to provide quotes for shuttle service. Please call the desired shuttle company for up-to-date pricing before your flight.

A Cab - (205) 520-5099: Cash only. No senior discount.

Airport Taxi - (205) 567-7089: 24-hour service. Senior citizen discount. Early morning pick-up.

American Cab - (205) 322-2222: 24-hour service. Early morning pick-up and drop-off.in the Birmingham Metro area. Accepts major credit cards.

Birmingham Door To Door Shuttle - (205) 591-5550: Operates 11:00 a.m. - 11:00 p.m. on Sundays and 4:45 a.m. - 11:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

Meteors Shuttle - (205) 980-1083: 24-hour service.

Yellow Cab - (205) 328-4444: 24-hour computer dispatch service. Accepts major credit cards.

Please click on "Sunday Orientation" and/or "Visiting Samford" links to the left.

We are no longer mailing out information packets. We are instead focusing on providing the information on the web through our online registration with 123Signup and through our website. We will also be sending out announcements through our e-mail list, which you may subscribe to on our "Communication" page.

In addition to the normal items (clothes, toiletries, etc.), you'll also need to bring your own pillow, bed linens, towel and washcloth.

All IGHR registrations include a meal ticket for Sunday dinner and the Thursday night banquet. All attendees staying on campus receive a meal ticket as part of their package. You can purchase one for $110.00 if you are staying off-campus. It is NOT a notable savings over paying for meals individually in the cafeteria. If you have not already purchased a meal ticket but would like to do so, you can get one when you arrive and at Sunday registration.

Cafeteria/Food Court: Please click here to visit the Samford University Campus Dining website for more information, including hours of operation and menu choices.

We typically do not know what dorms we'll be assigned until a couple months before the event. Once we find out we will post the dorm location on our "Housing" page.

Course locations are not determined until a few months before the event. Specific course locations will be included with your course information distributed at registration on Sunday.

All of the buildings on the Samford Unversity campus are non-smoking buildings. This includes our dorms.

Your courses should keep you busy during the day and there are several interesting sessions scheduled for the evenings, but if you feel the urge to explore or do some shopping, there are shopping centers in the vicinity: Brookwood Mall at the intersection of Lakeshore and Hwy 280; The Summit at the intersection of Hwy 280 and I-459; and Wildwood Shopping Center at the intersection of Lakeshore and I-65 as shown on this map.

For more information about things to do in Birmingham, visit the web site of the Greater Birmingham Convention & Visitors Bureau.

While you are at IGHR, you may login to Samford University's wireless network that requires a user name and password that will be distributed at registration on Sunday. For more information and instructions on how to set up your computer to connect to SamfordSecure, see here.

The wireless network at Samford is not 100% reliable throughout campus, so if connectivity is essential we recommend that you bring an ethernet cable as well. Your ethernet adapter should be set for DHCP, then select: "obtain an IP address" and set your web browser proxy settings to proxy.samford.edu, port 8080. Once you arrive on campus if you need help getting connected, feel free to ask any of the library or computer lab staff.

Attendees staying on campus during IGHR should be able to utilize the wireless access, but again we recommend packing an ethernet cable "just in case."

If you are not bringing a laptop to IGHR, you will have access to the internet through the many computers available in the library and computer labs across campus. Hours for the library and labs are available here and here.

The suggested dress code for the IGHR Banquet can be best described as 'business casual' or 'traditional church' attire as shown in the images below:

This question has been asked previously. Ms. Mills has offered the following response:

Course 4 gets requests from virtually every "educational program" to have its own course(s) accepted as one of Course 4's qualifying prerequisites. The one fundamental criterion for IGHR 4 is whether a student has a solid foundation in all the common record types -- essentially the types covered in Val Greenwood's Researcher's Guide to American Genealogy.

BU's emphasis on theory and analytical reasoning is a superb way to introduce genealogy. I would have no doubt that a graduate of our BU program would come to Course 4 being able to reason through issues at an advanced level. I would also expect them to already know pedagogical principles for scholarly research. The same can be said for the college presidents, deans, history professors, surgeons, attorneys, and even judges who enroll or ask to enroll in Course 4.

Unfortunately, we also discovered one thing more in the early years when we had no prerequisites. Academics and others who practice esteemed professions typically wanted to enroll in IGHR's advanced class, insisting that they had "already learned how to do research" in their graduate studies (in whatever field) and had honed those skills in their profession (whatever it was). When the administration let them enroll, we frequently had a problem -- for a reason they did not anticipate.

Our class focuses on an advanced level of methodology for the use of records that students are expected to be quite experienced with already. We build upon (but don't repeat) the "foundational knowledge" that students learn from Samford's intermediate class or from the NGS home-study course. Consequently, those who came into the class without that background, over and again, were not familiar enough with the types of records we were dealing with to benefit from the techniques that were being applied. Their basic questions about record types then slowed down the entire class.

When we set prerequisites, there were at first only three options:

• Completion of the Intermediate course at Samford, after which students had a year to practice using those records before they signed up for Course 4.
• Completion of the NGS Home Study Course, which typically means 16 or so months of hands-on work in records.
• Certification by BCG or accreditation by the AG program, which means they had actually been tested on their expertise with a wide range of records.

More recently, we added

• Completion of the NIGS program at the U of Toronto, which means 40 courses covering a range of records as compared to the single course that BU offers at this time. (Both BU's course and each course of the NIGS program entails roughly 120 hours of study.)

Beyond this, I have added one other option to the list of options, in an effort to accommodate all those good genealogists who do have adequate experience but have not met any one of the other prerequisites: the submission of a paper that demonstrates an adequate level of experience with research and documentation.