Hi, posting your question here is fine, but do consider x-posting to /r/Genealogy: it's not an academic sub, but family research is their passion

It's not particularly "shocking" to have a famous person with few surviving papers, personal correspondence, ledgers.... Many examples could be offered, here, but three figures immediately come to mind- journalist "Nellie Bly" (Elizabeth Cochrane) , Confederate General James Longstreet, and black vaudevillian Bert Williams- who are immensely interesting but whose biographers have been greatly hampered by a lack of records. Papers can get accidentally burnt ( Longstreet) or not preserved by family or friends ( Cochrane) or possibly just never kept ( Williams). And there have been noted Great Events: historians of technology have cursed the US Patent Office Fire of 1836 which burned almost every letter, record and patent model , and the US Civil War destroyed many county records in the Southern states documenting their colonial history.

I would suggest that, rather than operating at a high level, through World Cat etc., you try operating instead on a local one. Try to discover where the subject lived, and died. Go there. The PA Historical Society has an impressive collection ( and is well-used by geneologists) , but many counties have historical societies as well, and sometimes they too have some records, ledgers, etc. If one of your research subjects lived in Lebanon Co, for example, you might inquire at their historical society and perhaps even pay a visit. You may find yourself having to dig through a small book of local history written in 1902, that has a bad index, looking for names, or reading some barely legible letters for the same thing...but that's part of the fun.