Researching a building or home can carry sentimental value, or it can help you make important purchasing, remodeling, and preservation decisions. Plus, it's fun! Once you know the story behind a place, that story can help build more of a connection to its owners and visitors.
There are many reasons and ways for researching buildings and homes, and this guide exists to help you find the questions to your answers. Browse below for several methods to help you discover when the property was built, original and previous owners, past neighborhood characteristics, prior uses for the property, and more.
This site includes assessed value and property tax information for real property in Mesa County. The Assessor Lookup tool can be used to look up:
Call, email, or visit the Mesa County Assessor’s office to research your home further.
Mesa County Clerk and Recorder’s Office: Recorded Documents Search
This allows for a search for property deeds (transfers of ownership) that can help supply a chain of ownership for your property. This can be used for the following purposes:
Email or visit the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder's Office for more in-depth searching.
The Grand Junction city directories allow you to look up addresses and phone numbers. Some of the older directories also give you basic information about the owners or renters of businesses and residences. Newer city directories contain a reverse phone number and address index.
The Rashleigh Regional History room at the Central Library has city directories for the following years.
1904, 1907, 1909-1913, 1916-1919, 1922, 1924, 1926, 1928, 1930-1932, 1935, 1937, 1939-1941, 1943, 1946, 1949, 1951, 1953, 1955-1957, 1959-1966, 1968-1981, 1983-1985, 1987-1989, 1991-2002, 2004-2025
If you have a general idea of when your house was built, you can use the city directories to:
Visit our Central Library to utilize the available City Directories, or set up a Book a Librarian appointment with us if you'd like assistance.
This database is free to use with your Mesa County Library card. You can search for information about the property by county, city, date, keywords, or newspaper. For instance, searching for the names of previous owners or the address itself may lead you to new and interesting information. New content is being added regularly to this site, but some newspapers are limited in the years that have been digitized. Additional bonus: you can save and clip articles to email to yourself for future use.
These Mesa County newspapers offer the following date ranges for fully digitized years:
Other years are partially available for the above listed newspapers, but not in their totality.
Newspapers.com includes many of the same historic newspapers as the previous source, but also offers articles published to today. Keep in mind, however, that viewing more than a tiny snapshot of an article is not free and requires an account subscription.
The Daily Sentinel Index can assist you with locating local articles by date, subject, or headline from the Daily Sentinel archive. Once you've discovered an article you're interested in using for research, visit the Central Library to use a microfilm reader to save or print your desired article.
The Daily Sentinel is available on microfilm from November 20, 1893 to December 31, 2010 with the exception of the following.
- January 1950 through March 1950
- February 1981
- January 1993
- June 16 through June 31, 2010
Daily Sentinel issues from January 2010 through July 2025 are available in PDF format on the microfilm computers in the lower level at the Central Library.
Building Permits
Building permits are official documents issued when construction, remodeling, or significant repairs are done. They typically include:
The Mesa County Building Department offers:
If you would like additional assistance with your needs, please contact the Mesa County Community Development Department at 970-244-1636 or by email at MCComDev@mesacounty.us.
A blueprint is a detailed, technical drawing that can be used to document the original construction of a property, allowing researchers to understand the building's historical integrity. Blueprints can be rare or hard to access, but might be available through previous owners, the Mesa County Building Department, or the Mesa County Community Development Department.
Mesa County Libraries partners with the Museum of the West to create the Mesa County Oral History Project, a digital collection of recorded interviews with pioneers of Mesa County and surrounding areas, and interviews with the children of pioneers. These written transcriptions and audio interviews with original Mesa County settlers can be used to discover more about a certain location, neighborhood, or person who lived in your property of interest.
You can search the collection by towns and regions, neighborhoods, people of interest, subjects, or events.
Sanborn maps consist of a uniform series of large-scale maps, dating from 1867 to 1999, which depict the commercial, industrial, and residential sections of some twelve thousand cities and towns in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The maps were designed to assist fire insurance agents in determining the degree of hazard associated with a particular property and therefore show the size, shape, and construction of dwellings, commercial buildings, and factories as well as fire walls, locations of windows and doors, sprinkler systems, and types of roofs. The maps also indicate widths and names of streets, property boundaries, building use, and house and block numbers.
The Library of Congress has many maps for Mesa County, Colorado available within their digital collection.
Mesa County Libraries has a large variety of maps available in the Rashleigh History Room at the Central Library that may be used to discover more about your house and its original components. These maps include plat, geologic, and U.S. Census maps dating back to the early 1900s. Visit us to be directed to these maps, or meet with a local history librarian during Reference Help in the Rashleigh History Room, every Friday from 2-3pm (unless noted otherwise).
Old photographs can be used to research your home, providing a visual history of changes and unique perspectives from other time periods. You can use the following resources to photographs:
443 North 6th Street | Grand Junction, CO 81501 | (970) 243-4442