How do I find out if I inherited mineral rights?

Search the grantor and grantee indexes at the county clerk where the land sits, under the name of the relative you believe owned them, and walk the chain backward and forward. Look for mineral deeds, for mineral reservations in deeds where the family sold the surface, for oil and gas leases they signed, and for probate filings. State unclaimed property searches are a useful free shortcut for identifying which state to look in.

Can I find out if I own mineral rights for free?

Yes. County deed indexes, state oil and gas regulator well and production records, and state unclaimed property databases are all free, and many county indexes are now online. It costs time rather than money. A landman or title attorney can do it faster for a fee, which is worth it on a valuable interest and hard to justify on a guess.

What if the estate was never probated?

This is very common and it is why many families receive nothing. The interest legally remains in the deceased person's name and operators will not pay into that, so the royalty accrues in suspense instead. The cure depends on the state and may be a probate, an ancillary probate where the land is in another state, an affidavit of heirship, or a small estate procedure. It usually needs an attorney.

How to Find Out if You Own Mineral Rights (Free, Step by Step)

There is no national registry of mineral ownership. Nothing you can type a name into that returns an answer. Ownership lives in deed records at the county courthouse where the land sits, one county at a time, and everything below is a way of narrowing down which county to look in.

Start with what you already have

Before any searching, empty the drawer. Any one of these shortens the job from weeks to an afternoon:

A royalty check or a check stub. The single best document there is. It names the operator, the wells, your owner number and your decimal interest. See the statement decoder.
A division order. Names the well, the unit, and the legal description.
An offer letter from a buyer. The tract description in it came from a public record, and it is usually accurate even when the offer is not. See got an offer letter.
A deed, a will, a probate inventory, or an old tax notice. Legal descriptions are what you are hunting for: section, township and range in most states, or an abstract and survey number in Texas.
A federal estate tax return or a trust schedule. Assets get listed in these with more precision than anywhere else.

If all you have is a state and a family name, that is still workable. It just means starting one step further back.

Step 1: Find the county

Mineral ownership is recorded where the land is, not where the owner lived. So the first question is which county, and family knowledge is usually good enough to get you to two or three candidates.

Two free ways to narrow it down when nobody remembers:

Unclaimed property searches. Suspended royalties eventually escheat to the state, and the state publishes searchable lists by name. Finding your family name attached to an oil company's remittance tells you the state, and often the operator. See unclaimed royalties.
State regulator well searches by operator or by owner name. Coverage varies, but several states let you work backwards from a name. Our well records page lists the free search tools for twenty states.

Step 2: Search the county records

This is the actual answer. At the county clerk or county recorder for that county, you are looking for two indexes:

The grantor index, which lists what a person conveyed away.
The grantee index, which lists what a person received.

Search your ancestor's name in both. Then search the name of whoever they got it from, and keep walking backward until the chain is complete, and forward to see what was later sold or reserved. Many counties now have the indexes online, some going back a century, and many will search for you by phone for a small copying fee.

What you are looking for specifically:

A mineral deed conveying minerals to your family.
A reservation in a deed where the family sold the surface but kept the minerals. This is how most inherited mineral ownership happens, and it is easy to miss because the deed looks like an ordinary land sale until you read the exception clause at the end.
An oil and gas lease signed by your family, which proves both ownership and that somebody once thought it was worth leasing.
A probate or an affidavit of heirship moving the interest to the next generation. If it is missing, that gap is your problem to fix. See transferring inherited minerals.

Step 3: Find out whether anything is producing

Owning minerals and being owed money are separate questions. Once you have a legal description, check it against the wells:

Look up permits, completions and production for that section on the state regulator's free system. Our well records page shows where, state by state.
If there is a producing well on or pooled with your tract, someone should be paying somebody. If it is not you, the money is usually sitting in suspense under a name in your family. See unclaimed royalties.
If there is nothing producing, you may still own something worth real money, priced on future development rather than on income. See non-producing minerals.
Set an alert so you find out when something is filed near you, rather than years later. That is what Mineral Watch is for, and it is free.

If the legal description uses section, township and range and you are not sure what it covers, the section, township and range map will draw it for you and work out the acreage.

The two places this usually gets stuck

Nobody ever probated the estate

Extremely common. The minerals still legally sit in a dead person's name, sometimes for two or three generations, and no operator will pay into that. It is fixable, and how it is fixed depends on the state: a probate, an ancillary probate where the land is in a different state, or in some states an affidavit of heirship or a small estate procedure. See inherited mineral rights and selling before probate is finished.

The interest is split across a dozen cousins

Also common, and it is why so many owners hold decimals with six zeros after the point. It does not make the interest worthless, and it does change what your options are. See small interests and selling your share when siblings want to keep theirs.

What it costs to have someone do it for you

A landman running a full mineral ownership report typically charges by the day, and a title attorney charges more. That is money well spent on a valuable interest and hard to justify on a guess.

Which is why we will do the first pass for free. Not as a loss leader with a catch attached: we do this work every day, the first look takes us an hour, and we would rather be the company that told you the truth about what you own than the company that mailed you a number. If it turns out you own nothing, we will tell you that, and it costs you nothing. If it turns out you own something good, you are under no obligation to sell it to us or to anybody.

Tell us a name, a county, and a state.

That is genuinely enough to start. We will search the records, tell you what we find, and explain what it means in plain language. Free, no obligation, and we will tell you if the answer is that there is nothing there.

Ask a Landman Get a Free Valuation

Berlin Royalties is a mineral buyer and a landman shop in Tulsa, not a law firm. Probate and heirship procedures differ by state and an unprobated estate usually needs an attorney. We are a potential buyer of anything you find, which is why we would rather hand you the method than ask you to take our word for the result.

How to find out if you own mineral rights