Here’s how Proquest works. Let’s say you’re researching a murder that happened in the subway in 1967. With Proquest, you can narrow the search to that year, and then tell it to search on “homicide” and “subway”. Any articles that were written about murders in the subways that year will come back. If you just have the murder victim’s name and nothing else, just type in the person’s name. You can narrow the search down later if too much comes back. If you’re researching a murder in your building but you don’t have the year, just type in the address of your building and see what comes back. I was researching my own building once, and all these articles came back about things that happened in my building over the past 100 years, crimes, interesting people who lived here, etc.
There are actually lots of other amazing databases and resources out there, but this is a good place to start. If you don’t have access to Proquest—and Proquest doesn’t have all the newspapers in the country digitized yet, although they seem to be working towards that—good old microfiche is still a dependable, valuable resource.
If you need help with Proquest ask a librarian. This is their thing, finding information.
