By Terry Pohl, Spring 2025
The Power of Preservation Foundation is a coalition of agencies, organizations, neighborhoods, and advocates that creates a nonprofit San Antonio based group dedicated to preserving historic buildings through hands-on work and community driven projects. To this day they have helped repair and restore over 210 homes and more than 4,500 have been trained thanks to their programs and partnerships.
I have had two main roles in this internship. The first role has been to search city directories for addresses of note and then cross-reference the information with local newspapers. This was difficult because city directories are sorted by name and not by address so the process of finding the addresses was long and difficult. In addition, often the people who lived at the addresses would only live there for a year or so and thus I would have to start the process of looking up the addresses all over again. Then I would take the names and sort through local newspapers in an effort to find a history of the person and their family, this was often unsuccessful and I would only find obituaries. I collected information on 20+ sites, however only one was truly of any note. It was the story of a house that had a World War I veteran live there and a decorated World War II veteran live there. Both inhabitants left marks on the city and were mentioned in newspapers several times.
The second job I filled for this position was creating twenty instagram posts and four visuals to go along with each post. I did this through Canva and researching the organization. Prior to this I had never used either tool, so there was an initial learning curve as I learned about these tools. However, I quickly learned how to use these platforms, and I created fun posts with beautiful visuals to go with them. This process involved summarizing different posts on the Power of Preservation website and using those summaries to extract information for each post.
This experience gave me plenty of knowledge on how to navigate city directories, and how to navigate old newspapers, as those were my two main sources for the histories I was gathering. I focused on the histories of old buildings in San Antonio, often dating as far back as the late 1800’s. The hard skills I worked on was archival research, into old databases. The soft skills I learned was how to use Canva to create Instagram posts. This experience greatly benefited me as I plan to pursue a PhD and work as an archivist, both will require excessive research and the ability to have public outreach. My supervisor for the project, Jenny Hay, was amazing, she was supportive and informative for every step of the process. She also was very flexible on working virtually or in person. I could not have asked for a better mentor!
