Beginning my journey in Local History

I read the first three chapters of Nearby History: Exploring the Past Around You. Our old friend Robert Kelley popped up once again, so we know that Kyvig and Marty have at least some grounding in modern, disciplinary Public History. Nearby History read like a how-to book on researching local history, and I think especially that the lists of questions in "What Can Be Done Nearby?" will be a very nice tool to reference as we begin our research on Interstate 496.
(I found on Wikipedia they mention an ironic situation concerning the namesake of the highway, R.E. Olds. Apparently the highway is named for him, and yet his house, which was on the National Register of Historic Places, was destroyed to make way for it. The citation looks legitimate, although I was unable to corroborate it on the NRHC website, probably because the house has been destroyed nearly half a century.)
This will be a very different than my sixty-some pages of history written last semester, about a group of people I never got to meet in a country across the ocean. This feels so much more alive already, and we haven't interviewed a single person yet!Matthew Miller's Article for the Lansing State Journal is an obvious place to start our research. I read this and was impressed by the "traces" he found in his research. I look forward to finding out more about his sources. I see a lot of interviewing, but as a historian I wonder: How much corroborating did he do? Probably more than is obvious (where do you document such things in a newspaper article?) but I wonder what other directions we're going to have to go in in order to give this issue a full historical examination. Trust, but verify!

Other things I'm wondering about:
What were the other location options considered for the new highway?
How was public transportation affected by this new road?
*What did Matt Miller know about but omit from his article?*