Now, I want to make something clear from the get-go--no one ever said legislative history was easy. Least of all, me. It's detective work, deductive reasoning. It often involves legwork and serendipity. The answers you want are scattered all over, and, occasionally, your resources aren't as forthcoming as you'd like. The recodification project makes a lot of legislative history work particularly murky. It's why you need all this training.
So, what I'd like to do is offer you a glimpse at how a legislative history trace of a random Maryland statute might proceed. I didn't preselect a particularly easy statute, because I wanted to convey the ways in which the resources--especially the Annotated Code--can mislead the unprepared researcher. That said, my hope is that, better armored, better armed, the reader can avoid some of the pitfalls inherent in statutory backtracking.
You decide to keep going backwards, and turn to Chapter 291. As it happens, Chapter 291 is the one that recodified the predecessor article (Art. 33) as the modern Election Law title:
The revisor's note for §13-230 tells you that it was carried forward without substantive change from the 1957 Code's Art. 33, §§ 13-207(b), 13-208:
Accordingly, the original version of these statutes should appear in either the prior year's Maryland Code Annotated cumulative supplement (essentially, the pocket parts), or the most recent 1957 Code volume that still contains Article 33. Since we're looking for the origin of the exemption, we need to go further back.
As luck would have it, the 2001 Cumulative Supplement contains our two statutes, and the exemption language appears in §13-207(b). The legislative history information identifies another predecessor statute in its legislative history:
Here, the annotations under "Effect of Amendments" tell you that the 2001 and 1998 amendments were not relevant to the origin of the loan language, so you decide to track down the original appearance of Art. 33, § 26-8. It would have to have been in or before 1998.