 Okay, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event where we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians across the state and across the country, depending on our topics. We do these sessions live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, and they are recorded, however, so if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can pop over to our website and see recordings of all of our sessions that we've ever done on the show, going back to the beginning. We do all sorts of things on here, presentations, interviews, mini-training sessions, whatever, anything if it's related to libraries, we'll put it on the show. We're not very picky. It's about as picky as we get. Are you library-related? Sure. And we have guest speakers that come on sometimes, but we also have commission staff that do things, too. And that's actually what we have today, a whole team of commission people here that are going to talk to us this morning about the Nebraska Legislators' Database. Let me get on my page here, which I'll actually let you guys explain what that is. It sounds kind of self-explanatory to me, but figuring out what it's all about and what's in there. And we have, and I'm not sure what order they're going to do things, but I'll just, Alana, Navani, Beth Goble, and Mary Sowers are all here. And I'll let them introduce themselves and talk about what they're all doing with this during their presentation. So I'm just going to move the microphone over to you guys. And you can go over here. I'm going to start off. This is Beth Goble, and then we're going to kind of go wrong, Rob, and hear after that. So as you can see, Christa is showing you the Nebraska Access website, which I think you're familiar with. And what we're talking about today is Nebraska legislators past and present, and it is a new database that we have added to Nebraska Access. So you probably know that anything that's on our Nebraska Access site is intended for use by the public, not solely by librarians, although we hope librarians will be interested in this one, too. So first off, we'll just go to the new website and you can get there by searching. So Alana is driving for me today because I'm hopeless at trying to talk and navigate at the same time. So I don't know if you can tell, but she's just typing in the word legislators and other words like senator, if you knew that we call them state senators. Other words would also bring it up. So we're going to go to that third link down, which says Nebraska legislators past and present. So I'll just start off by telling you a little bit about why we did this. We get asked reference questions here at the Library Commission about the Nebraska Legislature in its various incarnations fairly often. Sometimes it's a genealogist who has a name of a family member and they want to get some verification that that person served in the legislature. And what we used to have to do was hope that they gave us at least some kind of a date or that they had the person's name, and that we would go to the Nebraska Blue Books to search for that information because there are lists in the Nebraska Blue Books who served in the different Nebraska legislators. And if we couldn't find the person, then we would email back and say, I'm so sorry, we didn't find your relative. So we didn't know of any other resource that would bring all of it together because the lists were obviously print resources and there'd be a list for the territory legislature, there'd be a list for the bicameral legislature and one for the unicameral legislature. So what we hoped was someday to find a way to just make a searchable way to find this. So a number of years ago we were provided with a document that had been prepared by the Legislative Research Division of the Unicameral and they had created a list of all of the senators who had served in the unicameral from 1937 to the present and this was a few years ago. And it also listed the district that they had served in and dates of the legislative journal that you could find information about them. So we were able to turn that into a spreadsheet and then create the precursor to what you see today as a little website where you could search by district and you could search by name just in the unicameral to find somebody. But the goal was always to try and make a database that was easier to search, had more ways to search and would list everybody from 1855, which is when our territorial legislature began to the present day. So that's kind of how we got this project done. It took several years and lots of editing to take the lists from the Blue Book. Alana, who's going to be talking to you in a minute, did the yeoman's work in creating the spreadsheets and a lot of editing work needed to be done and they were all combined into one spreadsheet. You don't need all this detail and then our computer wizard burn bias turned it into a database. So at this point, do you think of anything else I should say at this point? I'd like to just, I notice our audience is all from Nebraska. So you know we've had three legislatures, but yeah, I know we may have others watching it later. We've had the territorial legislature met from 1855 to 1867 by camera legislature, which is more like what's like all the other state legislatures at two houses, met from 1866. I know there's some overlap and we'll talk about that later until 1937. And since 1937, we were the only state in the union that has a one-house unicameral legislature and it is nonpartisan. We'll talk more about that later. So now I'd like to ask Mary Sowers, and by the way, she is our new government documents librarian here at the Library Commission, working on the information services team. And Mary's going to do some searching for you so you can see how it works. Good morning, everyone. First of all, before we begin demonstrating various search strategies that you can use with the database, I would like to invite our audience to type in your current state senator's name if you happen to know it, your district number if you know it, possibly what county you live in, or someone specific that you would like us to search for at a labor point during the show. If you'll just go ahead and type those in, we'll get those and eventually we will look for those for you. To get started with the searching in the database, first of where it's supposed to be here, our first box is name box. And one thing I do want to point out here are the instructions out to the side of the box that indicate last name or last and first name. You will notice that first name only is not indicated here. First name only actually works better if you put it in the free text box. But starting with just the basic name box, I'm going to... I just picked some names at random as I was doing some research for this. And one of the names I came up with was... I'm sorry. Yeah, I did. My apologies. Was Carpesec. And I'm going to just type in his name as a last name and hit search. And there are our results for Russ Carpesec. He is district 32 in the Unicameral. So he is current from 2007 to date. So that is one search strategy. Now if we go back to that same page, notice originally I did just the last name, and that works with any of the names. Or if you happen to know the person's full name, you can type in Carpesec. And again, same results. But if you don't know how to spell someone's last name, you can do a truncated version. So if I put in K-A-R, we do come up with quite a few names that have K-A-R in them. But you can see that our guy in district 32 does come up Russ Carpesec. So lots of different ways that you can type in names to find what you want. Another name that I came across that might be familiar to people is Chris Butler, who is currently the mayor of Lincoln. He comes up. He served in district 28 while he was part of the legislature. Again, if you don't know how to spell his last name, you can put in BEU. And he comes up. But if you have no idea how to spell his name, and this is transitioning over to the free text, but you do know that his first name is Chris, you can put that in. And guess it will bring up every name that has Chris in it, either first name or in the last name. But the third one down is Chris Butler. So lots of different ways that you can find names. Now, other ways that you can use the name if you happen to know the entire name, for example, if we want to do Terry Carpenter and find out what his history is. And that's the great thing about this database is you can find out the history of the different districts or you can find out a specific senator's history within the legislature. Terry has actually served in two different districts from 1965 to 74. He served in district 48. And before that, served in district 42. So a lot of you may remember Terry Carpenter as Terrible Terry Carpenter. I just want to point out that when you're talking about district, you are referring to the Unicameral District. That is correct. Yes, at this point I am referring to the Unicameral District. Now, I also did a search for my own senator. And again, I'm going to do this in free text. I did search for district 27. And this is a complete listing of everything in everyone who has served in district 27. And currently, based on looking at the different years terms of office, Colby Coash is the current senator for my part and I do live in Lincoln. So Colby Coash is my senator for that area of Lincoln. Other ways that you can search in free text, you can also search by town. So if I were to type in the town red cloud, it brings up everyone whose residence was in red cloud throughout the history of the legislature. And starting with C.R. Bess, who's bicameral, House and Senate. We have Unicameral, so this is comprehensive. Mary, I would just add to that that throughout the history of the, since we've been a state, for the territorial legislature, you'll be searching by county. That is correct. Rather than a place name. That is correct. And I do believe sometimes we only have residents listed as county. We do not actually have their town of residents on the bicameral. That is correct as well. Let's just say geographic searching is challenging. It really has to do with the way they were listed in the blue books. And just the way the representation was recorded. I'll explain those things. Two years to get this done enough. At least two years. We're not going to say how many years. Okay. And so other free text terms that we can use. I'm going to actually save until a little bit later just to do some fun things. But the other thing I wanted to point out about searching first names is that since they don't work in the regular name box, you can type them into the free text. So for example, by typing in, and I think I mentioned this with Chris Butler's name, but if I were to type in Barnabas, and you know that we had a Barnabas as a legislator, but it doesn't come up in the name box, try it again in the free text. And you can see that we had a Barnabas bait who served in the territorial council and house in the territorial legislature. Very quickly, just to show you how these work, because I know Beth and Elana are going to be touching on these as well. The Unicameral District, if you click on the drop-down box and click on a district number and search, it will give you a history of that district in the Unicameral. And I don't know if you noticed the difference if you were watching before. This time it's sorting it in date order with the most recent first. When Mary did the other search, it was in alphabetical order. When she did the free text search for Chris Butler, it was showing up alphabetically. So just a little bit different in the way the database works. And it does show you on the screen there next to your search how it is being sorted, so you can clearly see that. Go back to 19 since that was the one we were looking at. I clicked on 19 in the drop-down box, but when I actually put in district 19 in the free text, she is right. It comes up alphabetically. In the drop-down, it is by date, starting with 1937. And there is a reason for that. As we've had that question, people wanting a list kind of from beginning to end of everyone who served in a particular Unicameral District. Correct. Okay, moving on to the next one. This is a list of the territorial counties. One that I found of most interest was the Okikour, which became Knox County in 1873. This is a list of everyone who represented Okikour County in order of date. Now, one thing that I did notice is that John Taff appears several times, and it depends on what year he served. Like, for example, here he was in 1859 in the Territorial House, but in 1860 he was in the Territorial County. Council. Council, my apologies. And he appears again in 1861 as part of the Territorial Council. So if that part looks confusing, just remember that this, when you've looked at a particular Territorial County, it will be in date order. And then the last drop-down very quickly is the different bodies. If you would like a history of the Unicameral, the Bicameral House, the Bicameral Senate, the Territorial House, or just the Territorial Council. If you were to click on those, those will give you histories, which Beth and Atlanta are going to be talking about now. And I'll be back with you in a few minutes. Hopefully do some more searches. Okay, I think at this point, as I said, I make Atlanta drive for me. If you just scroll down to that link, the link at the bottom here, this is a link to all kinds of information. If you're interested in more than just searching, or you need some more help with how to search, we've provided some longer explanation about those three legislators for you. And first off, I'm going to just talk about the trends of the Territorial Legislature. I'm going to let Atlanta, I should say, talk about the Territorial Legislature, and then you'll hear from me later. Well, hello, everybody. As Beth mentioned, I am going to talk about the Territorial Legislature. As you see here, the big span of this legislature was from 1855 to 1867. Just to give you a touch of background in 1854 is when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was put into effect. And at that same time, then what they called the Organic Act also took place. And this is what was used to set up the first Territorial Legislative Assembly in the state. I won't read everything here, but it's on the screen. You can do that at a later time, of course. The first legislative assembly, though, actually did meet in Omaha in January 16th, 1855, and they adjourned on March 16th, 1855. That always surprises me because I can't figure out why you would want to meet in Nebraska during those months in January, February, but large. But because you weren't doing much on the farm. That is true. You're probably right about that. This first legislative, the Territorial One, is made up of two bodies, the House and the Council. The Council has 13 members and is elected for two-year terms. While the House of Representatives initially had 26 members, and they were elected for one year. Now, the number of people in the House have changed over the time between that 1855 and 1867 date. Let's see here. Let me jump back a second. And I do want to point out one of the ways to search for people that have served in the Territorial. As Mary pointed out here, she stole one of my examples already. That's okay. You can see here we do have a list of Territorial counties, and I'm going to repeat myself just making sure you realize that is only the Territorial counties, that's where we do have consistent information about counties. You will see county information appear in some of the bicameral entries. However, we don't consistently have that information for the bicameral, so this is limited to the Territorial. Also, if you look through the list here, you can see it's a little shorter than the county list we have currently today. And as you look through the list, you may find some counties that you don't recognize. Obviously, there was the Lockheed Court or however you pronounce that. My French isn't that great, so. There's also Forney, Green. Let's see, Jones. Monroe, I think that's all of them. I do want to point out that if you scroll down here a bit, we do have a little bit of searching tips. One of the things we do have is learn more about the counties. And we just put together a brief page that gives you an idea a little bit about some of the counties and how they changed. Obviously, I missed Calhoun there because that's the first one listed. And I do cite this information that most of this information did come from a book about Nebraska History by Harrison Johnson. And it is actually available full text online through the Google book. So if you actually want to read the book, it's there. You can see I have noted things like Calhoun County. Now it's called Saunders. Forney is Neema Hall. Green is Seward. Jones County, I will let you read the description yourself later on. Jones kind of is a little interesting because you can see here in the last line, the former Jones in the Divorcement, retaining the name of Jefferson and the former Jefferson County, assuming the name Thayer. So try to keep track of how they switched Thayer and Jefferson and Jones around is kind of interesting. I love that word, Divorcement. My name is very mentioned. The name was changed to Knox County in Monroe. And the other one I wanted to point out here that I noted was Clay County. Most of you are probably aware of the fact there actually is a Clay County today. However, the Clay County we are talking about at this time period in 1864 and 55 is not the Clay County we know of today. This Clay County was actually located between Lancaster and Gage County. And it was actually divided in half with the land going half to Lancaster and half to Gage County. And I did find a map, Coltrane's Kansas and Nebraska map from 1858. And I've already just brought that open here, so I didn't have to wait for it to load. So here you can see the map as I mentioned from 1855. I'm just going to zoom in a bit so you can see some of the county names. So if you go down here to the bottom, you can see here is that Clay County I mentioned sitting directly between Lancaster and Gage. There's the Jones County that I mentioned and how the Jones and Jefferson and switch games and all that fun stuff. You can see there's Green County. And I did notice on this map Green County is spelled G-R-E-E-N-E with an E on the end. And everything I've looked at in the Nebraska Blue Books does not have that final E on the end. So I don't know which one's right or wrong, but I left everything without the E since that's the way it is in all the Blue Books. Now this map, you had this already opened this map. Do we have links from the database to these so that people can just jump over? Oh, okay, cool. I just love those old maps. I was very curious. Yeah, the link is right there. I just didn't want to wait too long to open. I grew up a little farther here. There's Delaki Corp. Now if you're up on your shapes of Nebraska counties, you can see some of these. I know Dixon has changed. Cummins has changed. I know a few others of these have changed slightly. Most of them I think are in roughly the same spot. But it's obvious, like I said, some of them definitely have shifted a bit for the lack of a better term. So let me jump back over here again. And I'm going to go back to the search page. I probably, I'll just do a quick search. It's pretty obvious here, you know, you just select the county as Mary was saying before and do your search. And you can see that there was three people that served in the Green County. And that's because then, you know, the name changed to Seward. So when that name change happened in 62, of course, we don't have anybody showing up in the database after 1861. I'm going to go back to the Learn War about Nebraska Legislature's page that Beth pointed out earlier. And there's a few other links in this text here that I wanted to make sure I pointed out. Okay, is that better? So you mentioned the territory account is already at the link here I wanted to point out is from the Nebraska Blue Book of 1915. This is actually talks about the Nebraska legislative apportionments. I always want to say appointment. So if I say that wrong, please correct me. Apportionment makes me think of a piece of pie, you know, or how do they cut it up? Very good. Thank you for that definition. I am not going to read this full document. Obviously it's a nine page document and this actually covers how is the best in Nebraska was cut into pieces and how the different people were selected from across the state. You can see this document actually covers 1854 to 1911. And it starts out, you know, with the Organic Act and how it was done. During the time of the territorial legislation there was actually the apportionments were changed five different times. It does note in here that in 1855 one of the changes was done because there was actually five new counties added. It sounds like some of their things were questions at a point in time because this is, you know, at one point in time the governor did the apportionments and people were not happy about what happened. And as you read this document you will notice through the years they start talking about North Platte and South Platte. Those are not actually towns. Here's a table that shows again how the senators and House were appointed between the North and the South. And I think I did mention this does cover both the territorial and part of the bicameral, but I'm just going to talk about it all now. Keep scrolling down here. Again, there will be a map here towards the end. And you can see they kind of divide the state in half left and right. And then here you go. Here you can see the North Platte or the Platte River going across the state. And then this is how they talk about the North Platte and then the South Platte. And this one reminded me of today it's the interstate. We talk about being North of the interstate or South of the interstate, which doesn't completely follow the Platte River. But I found this document an interesting read if you want to know more about how this all took place and what was involved and how it changed over the years during that time period. And then the last document I want to point to for the territorial is, again, this is from the 1915 Blue Book. And in the Blue Book here, we actually found a list of all of the 12 legislative sessions that took place in the territorial House and Council. And it actually goes so far to show and tell you here. So here's the fourth legislative assembly. Now it does actually tell you what counties were represented and who represented that county. And I kind of have noticed, obviously, as I told you, the apportionment has changed over time. You will see as you kind of look through here, it's kind of easy to see that, okay, at one point in time you had multiple people representing these counties and then sometimes you only had one person representing a slightly different county grouping. I found this kind of a fascinating document to look at. I believe that's all I had about the territorial. Do anything to add or also let Beth talk about the transition then from a territory to a bicameral. And you can see we're just following along and elaborating a little bit on this page that we're going through. So there's the transition to statehood part. And the reason that we put that in there at all is because we thought it might be confusing to searchers that they're going to find people serving in the same year in two different legislatures. And why did that happen? Well, what happened was is kind of in preparation for statehood, Nebraska voters did adopt a constitution for the soon to be formed state of Nebraska and it provided for a state legislature that would have two houses. And they were going to call it the Senate and the House of Representatives, which is pretty standard for most states. They went ahead and met on July 4th and 1866 thinking that that would be the last time they met. And you see that that's listed as the first state legislative session. So what actually happened was that Nebraska hadn't become a state yet and it was Congress that had to pass the bill for statehood for Nebraska. But when they took a look at this constitution that had been voted on by the people in Nebraska, it didn't make any provision for African Americans or black people as they were probably called Negroes back then. There wasn't any provision in there for them to vote, but of course the Civil War was over and they were citizens by then. So at any rate, Congress then rejected that constitution and said, oh no, you know, you're not going to become a state until you do something to fix that constitution. So that was when there was another session held of the territorial legislature in 1867. And it adjourned and immediately the governor called a session of the state legislature, the bicameral legislature, and this gets really confusing. Their task was to address the problem with the Constitution. They met again, so you have, it just means you can read the whole thing for yourself, but it just means that you have both the territorial legislature and the state legislature meeting in the same years during this transition period. They fixed the Constitution, they went ahead and met in February of 1867, but the truth is our statehood day is March 1st of 1867, so they actually did meet three times that state legislature before we were officially a state. And so if you're ever doing research in this, that's why you see these first three sessions listed in years when we weren't officially a state yet. That's probably enough to say about that. Elena is going to go now going to talk some more about the state bicameral legislature for us. Thanks Beth for the transition there to statehood. I'm still confused about it. Just read what it says there if you really care. But you know the guy you're looking for or sooner or later it's going to be a woman. You may find them showing up and there are notes in some of these to indicate that somebody served in both legislatures, but you may find that the years overlap and that's fine. As Beth mentioned, I want to talk about the bicameral legislature then as she also mentioned then we have both the Senate and the House. Initially there were 13 centers, 13 centers and 39 representatives. Again, that document about apportionment I talked about earlier does go into and starts covering through some of this bicameral time, but I won't be time to open that obviously again. When it comes to searching the bicameral time period, I feel like we have the least amount of options obviously for this. You can use the free text and name search of course, but then the only other option to see a list of who is in the bicameral House or Senate is to use just the drop down option to see all the bicameral House or bicameral Senate members. And basically the reason for this is because of the information we have, there's no really good way to pull out any other search options at this point in time. You can see here, as we mentioned earlier, this is being sorted by term of office. And as Beth mentioned, you can see here we do show that this first gentleman on the list here who was in the territorial council, he was in the House, and he was also in the bicameral House. So this is just a long list by date. And I just kind of want to point out the fact that we start out here with counties representative, represented, and we have a list. If I would go down quite a ways down the list here, now you can start seeing we have residents. We do not no longer have that county information. So like I said, it makes it hard to pull out and make a specific search for this because of the difference of information and how things have changed over the years. I know we just listed as residents here as I was looking in for more information, some of the blue books. I'm kind of starting to wonder if really the residents is really not the town they lived in as opposed to where their post office box was. Because I have seen that in some of the blue books saying it wasn't town where they lived, it was post office. So I think something we'll have to put to our to-do list to do a little more search here. I think that carries over even into the Unicameral Bureau because if you were to search our former legislator, Deb Fisher, if you were to search her, it would give her residents as Valentine. Well, she doesn't live in Valentine. She lives on the ranch in the county that Valentine is in. But her post office box is probably Valentine. Hard to say. So it's, as we said, geographic searching is challenging. And the other thing I wanted to point out is that I have started seeing information where there was some type of districts that were going on in the bicameral area. But we've never, in the list of information we had, we did not get that information broken down. I have seen some of it now again in another blue book. I'm not sure if we will ever take the time to go back and add that to the database just because of the amount of time involved. That's a whole other conversation. I know we have over 3,700 people in this database just to give you an idea of how many records we're talking about dealing with. I am going to go back. I should mention just, most of you probably already know this, but there's always, when you are looking at one of these longer lists, you can always just do a control F and do a find on the page. So if you are looking for something specific, you can then just search the information that is being displayed. Yes, I believe there are thousands in the state bicameral list. Yeah. So it'll take you a while to scroll through them. I am going to go back now and do a search on a particular person's last name. And this is a last name Gillespie. And I just wanted to point out here, Ms. Mabel Gillespie from Gretna, she served in the bicameral house from 1925 to 1935. So if you note those dates, 25 to 35, I want to go back and I want to point out another resource we have available here. There are brief biographies of the legislatures. You can see now these, what one of the past staff member has done here at the commission has gone to the different blue books and has scanned the biographies that appear in the different blue books. And so I am going to go to the 1926 blue book. I know that Ms. Mabel started, this is Mabel started actually serving in 25. But from looking at these, I know that the 1926 book actually lists the 1925 senators and legislators. And these documents happen OCR. So you should be able to do a search and find Ms. Mabel here. And I just wanted to point her out because she's actually the first woman in Nebraska to take the oath of office in the state legislature. So I thought that was kind of interesting. But then as I was, so you can see what party they're from. But the thing I did note that was kind of interesting. I did do a search obviously, but the pictures, the names are written in kind of a cursive writing here. So the OCR didn't pick them up. Let me jump to page 4. I'm jumping here to page 6. And as I was looking through this, I thought, oh, you know, Mabel here was the first person they said sworn in. But if you keep going, you can find there's Clara. And there is actually, let's see, Sarah and she's on page right here. So the only thing I can figure out is that Mabel, her district number is the lowest of the three. So she was sworn in first, even though there was three women elected that year. So I just thought that was kind of interesting. Well, I am going to turn this back over to Beth now. Okay. And she can transition us into the unicameral. And I think we're talking to Nebraskans today, but for any of you that aren't from Nebraska, there's lots of information out there on how we came to have the only unicameral legislature in the country. Interest in this started actually back as early as 1913, but it really didn't go anywhere. And I think personally, I think a large part of that was that there was a vested interest on the part of all the people serving in the bicameral legislature, where there were as many as 100 in the House of Representatives and 39, 43 maybe. Anyway, we had the senators as well. If you think about having a unicameral legislature that's nonpartisan, you're going to take away some, how do I put this, vested interest on part of quite a few people in having a job doing this and having a lot of influence. So I think personally, that's why it didn't really go anywhere. But Nebraskans probably all know about Senator George Norris. He was a great statesman in our state. He had served in the House of Representatives and then was a U.S. Senator. And in the 1930s, he got involved. He was a great proponent of this concept that he felt that there would, and many people felt that there would be less corruption. There was a conference committee that used to meet to, well, similar to what goes on in the federal politics that would meet to discuss bills that might have been similar bills that were passed in both houses. And then they would meet in secret and kind of come up with the final version, but nobody really had any more say in it. Nobody got to be there to testify or anything like that when they met. So he started campaigning the state to get an amendment to the Constitution that would be on the 1934 election ballot. And he was widely respected by people from both parties and I think very revered by the people, too. And they did get it on the election ballot and the voters approved it by a very substantial margin. So that's how we came to have, you know, unicameral legislature. So when it was first started, they could have had anywhere between 30 and 50 legislative districts, because that was what the new constitution provided for, but they chose to have 43. And it first convened in 1937. And back in those days, they all just served two-year terms. So there were a lot more of them in those early years. And then in 1964, they changed. There was a constitutional amendment and I'll go into some of the nastiness about all that. There was quite a controversial period in the 1960s having to do with apportionment. And there were some battles fought over that. But one thing that was not really controversial was increasing the number of senators to 49 and having them serve four-year terms. So since 1966, all of our senators have served four-year terms. And since 2008, they have been term limited to two consecutive four-year sessions. But that doesn't mean you can't sit up for four years and run again. And we, Nebraska, know very well that Senator Chambers is now back because he sat out for four years and he's now been re-elected. So as Alana has gone into in quite some detail, the same sort of thing. We have a district search available. And are you going to talk about this or am I going to talk about it? I think I was going to talk about it in a little bit more detail. If you were back at our main page with the dropdown, you can search by legislative district. And just keep in mind that because of reapportionment, redistricting, the increase in the number of districts, you're going to find people that serve in more than one district. Or you may search on somebody's name who's currently serving in, let's say, District 49. And you wonder, well, what happened to all the other people from District 49? The same person may have served in a different district. I'm not making myself very clear. But you might be better doing a name search. And I could cover that in one of my searches in a moment. Yeah. So because when the reapportionment took place, some of the districts literally moved. I know one district number used to be in the panhandle. Now it's suddenly in the eastern side of the state. And there's one in the northeast part of the state where a senator actually had to sit out for two years because he was redistricted out of his district. And he actually sat out for two years and then ran again in a different district. He hadn't moved, but his district had sort of switched out from under him. Okay. I did want to talk a little bit about reapportionment in the 60s because it was such a big fight. And after the Unicameral was formed for many years, they continued to just use the same districts that had back in the bicameral era with the 43 districts. Well, they did do, they passed some amendment to the Constitution that allowed for reapportionment and to create those 49 districts. However, what it said in the Constitution was that they could consider geography as well as population. Now you think about this is the era of the 60s, the civil rights movement, all kinds of things were going on nationwide. We also had Lincoln and Omaha who had become very large cities and people in those districts felt that they were underrepresented the way that it was being done then because it followed county boundaries. So things were getting kind of out of whack with the representation by population. At any rate, this constitutional amendment was passed by the voters which allowed them to consider both geography and population. Well, the U.S., there were lawsuits for file and the federal courts ruled basically that federal courts had jurisdiction over how states did their apportionment. So that was number one. And then the Supreme Court weighed in and passed some landmark legislation that we now think of as a one man, one vote edict. Basically saying that you could base it only on population. As much as possible, your districts had to be based on population and not area or county boundary or something like that. But they also, because you can, if you look at the dropdown further down, you see our district maps. The one that says 1962, I think is, that's the same map going back to the bicameral era. Nothing had changed with that one. They just kept going for all those years without doing any reapportionment since 1937. And then in 1964, you see another map. These are scanned out of the Nebraska Blue Book, by the way, where things have changed. We've now got the 49 districts. But with this one, they did go ahead and do their apportionment partially considering the geography. So that got thrown out of court. But the court did say you can go ahead and have your election in 1964 based on this apportionment that we don't agree with. But then you're going to have to go back and do another reapportionment before the next election. So then you see another map that says 1966, 1970. So this is what they did because federal law was telling them they had to do it over again. So it was quite a battle. And we do have a nice document that was prepared by the Legislative Research Office of the Nebraska Legislature that if you really want to get into this, you get a chronological history of everything that happened between 1934 and 1966 having to do with apportionment. And so I was talking to a friend the other day who was very interested in politics and old enough to remember this gig fight in the 60s. And it really was quite a deal. And the terrible Terry Carpenter that you saw the sample search from Mary from earlier was involved. He was of the point of view that geography should be considered just so you know. And I don't know if that's one of the reasons he's considered terrible Terry. But anyway, did we have anything more we wanted to say? You wanted to say now the apportionment changes every, could change every 10 years? Right. So when you see the map that says 1972 there, we do a, as you know, we do a big census every 10 years, the decennial census. So what happens now is the first file that goes to the President of the United States and then to the States is a total population count that goes right down to election district level. And each state legislature is required by law to do a reapportionment then based on that new census data. So we've got these scanned maps from the blue books that you can look now they're starting to follow the years. 72 would be when they, the blue book where they came up with a new apportionment, reapportionment probably in 1971 based on the 1970 census. And so it goes. And Alana has even found the bills that actually passed. It was printed on the maps. Oh. And then the final map at the very bottom, that one that says 2011, this is a direct link to the Unicameral's website where they have all kinds of maps there that will help you figure out what district and what senator and so on and so forth. And you can download these maps as well. So. Did we want to do some fun searching really quickly? I think we have any questions, Krista, before we move. Yes. If anybody has any questions about anything that's been shown, you can put that into the questions section of the GoToWebinar. We have a couple of suggestions that when you have to earlier, go get searches. Laura Hess, who's at Stanton Public Library, says Stanton County is her county. So if you want to see what comes up in there. Well, first of all, let's go to territorial counties and see if Stanton, no, it was not a territorial county. So the one thing I will say about counties, especially if you use them in free text is there sometimes it will come up, especially if it's mentioned in a note, but sometimes it will not. So I will type in Stanton County or Stanton. And yes, it's coming up as a residence, not necessarily as a county. Any other questions? Susie Dunn says that Bill Avery serves her district. So what do we got for him? Let's try Bill Avery. There he is. He is in Unicameral District number 28, and he's served continuously from 2007 to date. He just got reelected. Yes, I do believe he did. Any other questions? No, nothing has come in. If you have any other questions or any other things you want him to look up here. One thing, a few little search terms that we had fun with when we were prepping for this broadcast was various search terms that are in notes, especially if you type them into free text. It's interesting what will come up. For example, the word appointed, if you just type that into free text in the notes you will see that it says appointed or elected to fill a vacancy. And any of those words, if I typed in elected or vacancy, all of these would have popped up. Resigned is another word that comes up in the notes. If typed in, this one, 1935, resigned before term ended. There are actually quite a few of those. It doesn't necessarily say if at all, what or why they resigned, but it does say resigned before term ended. Another one, unfortunately, the word died when typed in. Quite a few legislators died while in office. One that I was researching yesterday for something, Jerome Warner, served for a very long time for 30 years, 32 years, but unfortunately died in 1997. So he died towards the end of his term and then was appointed, his seat was appointed to someone else temporarily. Yes, and Beth's favorite search is removed. And especially during the bicameral and it seems mostly to be bicameral, there is one, you know, camel so far. And I was thinking there were some in the territorial as well. But like, for example, John H. Taylor replaced someone in this group, Frank Berman, John H. Butler, Levi Cox and Joseph Crow were removed from office and then their seats were filled by other people. So unfortunately it doesn't say, yeah, it's interesting to think about why were these people. Yeah, exactly. I guess it's probably most of them were a vote recount of some sort, but maybe there were some other, even wilder things going on. Yes, they're very well could have been. The other one that I wanted to do real quick, just because I was having fun with this yesterday, was all of a sudden I'm going, oh, where's Waldo? And so I typed in Waldo. And not only do we have a first name of Waldo, but we also have Willard H. Waldo who served in the Unicameral. This one I should just say after a vote recount. There is a Y on this one. That is correct. So lots of interesting tidbits in the notes. And if anything, just go to the different areas of the searching that you can do, type in various keywords, see what you come up with. I think you'll be surprised at how much fun it is. We do have a question that just came in. Susie wants to know, can you search for information that tells you what committees a senator serves on? Is that something that's in here? Information is not included any regularly in any of the entries that I'm aware of. That's correct. But just for fun, I did type in committee and no, it does not. That's not something this database would do. You'd go to the Unicameral's own website. Well, I think you have to go back to the old blue books. Right. Now what you could remember, Atlanta showed you those brief biographies. It's possible. I'm not sure that you could, but you knew the name of your guy. And you'll get a search to find the time period. In other words, which blue book you're likely to find that little brief biography in. You might be able to read that and get some committee information. Guy or gal, I should say. Well, just for example, when I was researching Jerome Warner yesterday, he was in the, he was in the 25th district. And yes, in the biographies, it does say chairman of the 65 government and military affairs committee, member of labor and education committees, chairman of the legislative council. And those biographies do list a little more detail. Okay. So that's a. The other last minute. Oh, are you guys done? Sorry. I didn't want to say it's last time's up. We may have any last minute questions you want to toss out or have them look for anything. Anything last wrap up that you guys want to do. Well, we hope you find it helpful. And if you work in a library that where you have lots of genealogists contacting you, we think that'll be, it'll be very helpful for genealogists and also hoping that it will be helpful for researchers, people just researching who served when and where. Yeah, it's getting that a lot of people involved interested in history and would think find this is just something to totally dive into and just get lost in. Yeah. And even kids doing school reports, I think we'll find this very helpful. Definitely. Yep. If you're in citizenship, at least in the Lincoln public schools, you're required to take a citizenship class in high school. Maybe this would help you. You had to find a history of everybody who searched, who lived in, who'd served in your district. All right. It doesn't look any last minute questions have come in urgently. Thank you. Thank you guys. Elena, Beth, and Mary for doing this. Grab the microphone over here for myself. So that will wrap it up for today's session. It was recorded. So we can always go back and watch it again later. Actually, if you don't know it here, type in encompass live on there. Bring up the website. Yeah, I'll just bring it right up. No, the main page. There we go. All right. I got it now. OK, so that will wrap it up for today. So thank you very much for attending and learning all about the Nebraska legislature. More than just the database. And I hope you'll join us next week. Next week is our monthly tech talk with Michael Sowers. Normally it is the last Wednesday of the month, but we bumped it up one week this month due to scheduling issues. Other things are going on. We have a different session the last Monday, the last Wednesday of the month. So he will be on next week talking about the topic of narrating the OPEC. How can storytelling and narrative analysis improve the user friendliness of the online public access catalog OPEC? And we will have Mark Shane Scale on the line from us. He is originally from Jamaica. He is up in Canada right now. He is a PhD student in library and information science at Western University in Ontario. And he's been doing research on the OPEC. So he's going to be joining Michael next week to talk about what he's learned about that. So I hope you will join us for that next week. And we are... And Compass Live is on Facebook. So if you are a Facebook user, hopefully it'll come up. You can like our page on Facebook to get notifications of when we have anything new coming up and recordings are available when new episodes have been added. Reminders of the upcoming shows. And Facebook has been very slow. Trust me, women. We'll just give it. Never mind. We are on Facebook. Use the link. If Facebook isn't being slow, you can go there. So thank you very much for joining us today. And hopefully we'll see you next week. Bye. Bye.