Well those old maps at the libraries are golden. Not literally of course. One thing I've tried to do is a specific period search using several criteria that my hair-brained self came up with.
Firstly, I read every story of local tragedy from 1930 to 1933. Especially car accidents, which in that period could result in entire families being lost.
Why car wrecks? If you had a car in the early days of the depression, you some money. Add to that the run on banks over the period, and then eliminate all those who were in the process of moving or migrating when the accident happened. Why eliminate those? They probably had little carried it with them and would have been relieved of what little they had then.
What's left then is a picture of someone who at a particular time in American history had some resources, was not leaving the area to seek better climes and suffered a tragic loss. Then check that list against city directories of the day. Find out where they worked, is there a congregational list at the churches of that day available? This is another clue. No stereotyping, but persons of some denominations were more likely to stash away something than those of another. List gets smaller.
Now you have to decide if the person(s) were likely to have hidden something in their house, yard/garden or garage. Especially important is whether or not this is the type of person who may have dared to gone against FDR and kept a few gold coins. Well, are they first or second gen. Americans? It was a common trait among turn-of-the century immigrants to keep the old world tradition of a small garden stash. List gets smaller.
Lastly, you have decided who was likely among the unfortunates of that period to have left something behind, you know where they lived. Now find the opportunity to hunt that site. When I first went through this process I also limited my hunt sites to those that fell in a certain neighborhood that was being razed.
One the sites happened to be a boarding house run by a son of an immigrant from the early 20's to the early 30's when he was actually run down by accident and left a family that was subsequently lost when they were forced to leave the place to join their family home, now absent his income and apparent monies. I searched the site and did find lots of individual coins from the right era, but no collection. Lots of trash. Later after it was razed another detectorist told me one of his friends did find a stash there of small size but good coinage both gold and silver. I never saw this find and it may have just been a jab or it may have been vinidcation. Either way, just giving you one possible research option, all the tools of which should be fairly readily available to you should you care to do a little reading and some deductive reasoning.
