GODORT (Government Documents Round Table)

 View Only
last person joined: 2 days ago 

The mission of the Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) is to (1) To provide a forum for discussion of problems, concerns, and for exchange of ideas by librarians working with government documents; (2) to provide a force for initiating and supporting programs to increase availability, use, and bibliographic control of documents; (3) to increase communication between documents librarians and other librarians; (4) to contribute to the extension and improvement of education and training of documents librarians.

Learn more about GODORT on the ALA website.

Back to discussions
Expand all | Collapse all

Congressional member's family members biographical information

  • 1.  Congressional member's family members biographical information

    Posted Dec 13, 2021 10:14 AM
    Hello from a lover of government information, GODORT member, but not a Depository Librarian,

    I have two requests that came in I need help with:

    1) Collecting data on Congresspeople's spouses (particularly their occupation), as well as Congresspeople's pre-congressional careers (particularly those with legal background). We have put in a lot of work to collect these data we have the spouse's names, but have run into challenges on both fronts, particularly for members of Congress in earlier years, and particularly for male members (i.e. there is little information on female partners of male members early in the period, 1980-2018).   I was wondering if you might have any suggestions for sources that we may not have consulted. Our sources comprised the Biographical Data of the US Congress. Wikipedia, Votesmart, members' (campaign) websites, general Google searches on spouse's name, Ballotpedia, and the like. 
    a) Spouse
    b) pre-congressional careers (employers)

    2) I have a question concerning some data on members of the U.S. Congress.  We would need the data for the time 2000 and 2021 in the best case. 
    For our purposes, we tried to find the number of daughters that a member has. Unfortunately, for some of them, we could not locate any in the official records, on their personal website, some have deceased, and/or seem to have disappeared from the face of the earth. 
    We have verifiable information for more than 90% but are still missing a couple of these people. As we would like to check all possibilities of identifying as many data points as possible, I was wondering whether you had an idea where to best locate this type of data? Does anyone have this type of information other than the usual suspect like opensecrets.org? 

    Any help is welcomed

    Jennifer Boettcher


    ------------------------------
    [Jennifer] [Boettcher]
    Business Reference Librarian
    boettcher@georgetown.edu
    (202) 687-7495
    @jenny.wombat
    ------------------------------