Yes, I did use Newspaper.com. Unfortunately the Fort Worth Star-Telegram wasn't archived there. I had to find copies of their stories elsewhere poking around the internet. Newspaper.com had several stories from a few other local papers, I can't remember if Houston Chronicle was one of them off the top of my head. The Cuero Daily Record had several stories. Newspaper.com is where I found the clipping from Vernon also. I was really pleased to find it, because I'd seen that lead pop up before but till then I'd never been able to trace it back to a contemporaneous source. There was also a paper with a story in France I remember, because one of the girls had an Uncle that lived over there, but it didn't contain any new information.
Jumping in for a second here - TG (and any other sleuthing locals who are interested!): are you from the Fort Worth/Tarrant County area? If so, you can get a Courtesy Card from
TCC to use their databases (I'm not sure if you can access the online databases from home with a Courtesy Card, but I would think you'd at least be able to access them from within the library itself). Any Texas resident from outside of Tarrant County can go to their nearest participating library to get a
TexShare card and use that to get a Courtesy Card as well.
The reason I bring this up is because TCC has the best free access to news databases that I've been able to find so far. They have an account with Newsbanks' "Access World News - Historical and Current" database, which has an archive from the Star-Telegram going as far back as 1902. I was able to find several contemporary articles from the time period that the girls went missing from. The same database is fantastic when sleuthing other cases from elsewhere!
(If you live in the Arlington/Mansfield/Kennedale/Grand Prairie area or have a TexShare card I'd highly recommend looking into getting a card with them too, just because of the awesomeness that is the
MORe Library program.)
I'd
highly recommend that any of y'all out there who live near a local college/university look into the databases they have available and if possible, consider looking into getting an account with them.
Okay, nerdy librarian rant over. To keep this comment relevant to the actual topic: I saw the fundraiser link on my timeline when I opened up Facebook this morning (I'm not even in the group that has been mentioned in this thread, but every so often something from it shows on my timeline). It was already at almost $2000 when I first saw it and then when I went back a few hours later after reading some of the newer posts in this thread, it was up another couple of hundred. I have confidence that they'll be able to raise the full amount by the time the fundraiser ends. Even if those girls aren't down there after all, at least we will be able to strike that theory out.