Bill tracking is a distinct process within legislative history research, and refers to tracing the step-by-step progress of a bill through a legislative session. Very often, the term is applied to tracking of current bills, but I'm using it here to refer to the tracking of a historical bill's progress through the legislature while it was being considered. This can be very useful when you need to track down the genesis of, or rationale behind, particular amendments.
For further discussion of the legislative process, please refer to the Legislative Process tab.
Your foray into legislative history backtracking discovered that the genesis of the loan language in Maryland’s campaign finance statute was House Bill 1047 (1991). Now let’s see what we can find out about it.
Unfortunately, a visit to the General Assembly website reveals that legislative history isn’t available online for statutes prior to 1996, so we’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way. To the House Journals!
The House Journal for 1991 has an index of all bills introduced that session in numerical order. Turning to the entry for House Bill 1047, we find:
This indicates the page numbers on which bill activity occurred during the 1991 session, with numbers in parentheses referring to Roll Call votes. The first entry, page 727, is the first reading of the bill, dated Feb. 11, 1991:
Note that the last statement reports that the bill was referred to the Committee on Constitutional and Administrative Law for discussion.