How to find out who owns the mineral rights

C.R.S. § 30-10-408

Every Colorado county clerk and recorder keeps a grantor index and a grantee index, and a chain of title is traced by working name by name back through them.

Checked July 29, 2026. Section read at colorado.public.law, current through Fall 2025. It sets out seven columns for each index: time of reception, names of grantors, names of grantees, type of document, volume and page where recorded, remarks, and description of tract. Subsection (1)(b) requires the clerk and recorder to make correct entries in the grantor index of every document filed or recorded concerning or affecting real estate, entering the names of the grantors in alphabetical order, and subsection (2) does the same for the grantee index. This establishes the index a title search actually runs on. It does not establish how any individual county exposes that index online, which differs county by county and is not published here.

MCL 324.61506(n)

Michigan's supervisor of wells is empowered to require reports and maps showing the location of every well, the keeping and filing of logs, well samples and drilling, testing and operating records, and to require identification of the ownership of oil and gas producing leases, properties and wells.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at the supervisor of wells powers section of the Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Act. Recorded under records because that is what it produces: the two powers together are why Michigan holds a body of well logs, samples, operating records and lease ownership information at all. The same subsection that requires logs and samples provides that well data and samples furnished to the supervisor may be held confidential on the written request of the well owner, so not everything filed is public, and the terms of that confidentiality were not read. Nor was the division's public search interface located during this pass, which is named in this page's gaps.

Mont. Code Ann. § 70-21-302

Every Montana conveyance of real property that is acknowledged or proved, certified and recorded as the law prescribes is constructive notice of its contents to subsequent purchasers and mortgagees from the time it is filed with the county clerk. A certified copy of a recorded conveyance may be recorded in any other county with the same force as the original.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 70-21-302. The recording officer named in the current text is the county clerk, which is the office a Montana searcher deals with, and the section is the companion to the priority rule: it is what makes a recorded instrument bind someone who never saw it. Note the reach of the notice as the section states it, to subsequent purchasers and mortgagees, which is narrower on its face than Oklahoma's equivalent, which names purchasers, mortgagees, encumbrancers and creditors. Subsection (2) is the practical provision for land straddling a county line or for a chain that moved between counties: a certified copy of a recorded conveyance may itself be recorded in another county and has the same force there as the original would.

Mont. Code Ann. § 70-21-207

Letters patent from the United States or from Montana, and other documents issued under their authority that evidence or affect title to land, may be recorded in Montana without acknowledgment or further proof. Where the patent has been lost or is beyond the control of a party claiming title under it, a certified transcript of the issuing government's own copy may be recorded instead, and that record has prima facie the same force as the original until the original is recorded.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 70-21-207, whose history line runs back to the Civil Code of 1895 and to California Civil Code section 1160. This is the second route this record has found from a state page into the federal reservation record, and it is a different route from New Mexico's. New Mexico's recording statute names United States patents among the instruments that shall be recorded. Montana's instead makes the patent easy to get onto the record and supplies a substitute when the original is gone, which is the practical problem for a nineteenth century patent: a certified transcript of the issuing government's own copy is recordable in lieu of it. Read alongside the federal record on this site, that matters because the patent is the instrument which decides whether the minerals under a tract were ever conveyed into private hands at all. What this record does not establish is how much Montana land carries a federal mineral reservation, in acres or in proportion, and no figure for it is published here. Section 82-2-113 separately makes a United States patent for a mining claim conclusive evidence that Montana's location and record requirements were met; that provision concerns mining claims rather than oil and gas and was read but is not relied on above.

N.M. Stat. Ann. § 14-9-1

New Mexico requires all deeds, mortgages, leases with an initial plus option term over five years or memoranda of them, leasehold mortgages, United States patents and other writings affecting title to real estate to be recorded with the county clerk of each county where the land sits.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read from an allowlisted mirror stating it is current as of January 1, 2024, because the official copy would not extract. The phrase worth stopping on is United States patents, which no other recording statute on this record names. Where land was patented out of federal ownership, that patent is the instrument which decides whether the minerals under a tract were ever conveyed into private hands at all, and it is the document the federal record on this site says a county search cannot substitute for. The section also allows shorter leases and memoranda of their material terms to be recorded, and defines what a memorandum of material terms must contain.

N.D.C.C. § 47-19-46

An unrecorded North Dakota instrument is valid between the parties to it and against those who have notice of it, but knowledge of the record of an instrument outside the chain of title does not amount to that notice. A conveyance recorded before the deed that vested record title in its grantor stops being out of the chain once that later deed is recorded.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 47-19-46. This is the rule that tells a title searcher how far the search actually has to go, and it is the practical companion to the priority rule: a document that sits outside the chain of title does not bind a purchaser merely because it is on record somewhere. The proviso at the end of the section is the exception that matters, and it is recorded here because it is easy to miss: a mortgage, deed or other conveyance recorded before the instrument that vested record title in the mortgagor or grantor is no longer treated as out of the chain of title once that instrument is itself recorded.

R.C. 1509.30

The holder of a royalty interest in an Ohio natural gas well may require the well owner to report the volume of gas the holder was paid for, the price per thousand cubic feet paid to the holder, and the volume shown to have passed through the owner's meter for the field. The owner must keep those records for two years and answer a request within fifteen days or by the end of the current payment period, whichever is later.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read at section 1509.30, effective July 14, 1972 under Senate Bill 387 of the 109th General Assembly. This is the first rule on this record giving a royalty owner a direct statutory right to the numbers behind their own cheque, and it is recorded under records because that is what it produces. Two limits are in the text: the request may be made no more frequently than the payment period in the holder's contract, and the reportable back window is the most recent period plus any earlier periods within two years of production for which no report has been given. Where the holder's well is metered the owner must also report the volume through that meter, and volumes are reported on the basis of a standard cubic foot. The section speaks only of natural gas wells; nothing here establishes an equivalent right for oil.

16 O.S. § 16

Every conveyance of Oklahoma real property that is acknowledged or approved, certified and recorded as the law prescribes is constructive notice of its contents to subsequent purchasers, mortgagees, encumbrancers and creditors from the time it is filed.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read in the Legislature's complete-title PDF for Title 16. The section dates from the Revised Laws of 1910 and still refers to the register of deeds; the recording officer a reader deals with today is the county clerk, which is the office Section 75 of the same title directs marketable title notices of claim to and the office the affidavit sections operate through. This record has not read the statute that renamed or reassigned the office, so the change of name is noted rather than sourced.

Tex. Prop. Code § 11.001(a)

To be effectively recorded in Texas an instrument relating to real property must be eligible for recording and must be recorded in the county in which a part of the property is located, and the county clerk must record instruments affecting the same property in the order they are filed and keep the indexes required by law.

Checked July 30, 2026. Chapter 11 read on the Texas Legislative Council's own statutes site, which states the statutes are current through the 89th 2nd Called Legislative Session, 2025. Section 11.004 sets the recorder's duties: a county clerk shall correctly record within a reasonable time any instrument authorised or required to be recorded, shall record instruments relating to the same property in the order the instruments are filed, and shall provide and keep the indexes required by law. Section 11.008 expressly includes a mineral lease in its definition of an instrument recorded by a county clerk relating to real property, and provides that all such instruments are subject to inspection by the public. Note the site is a JavaScript application: a plain fetch of the chapter URL returns the site shell rather than the chapter, and this was read in a browser.

Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records

The Bureau of Land Management publishes federal land conveyance records for the public land states, with images of more than five million federal land title records issued from 1788 to the present, which is where a patent carrying a mineral reservation is found.

Checked July 29, 2026. Quoted from the General Land Office Records site's own description, read in a browser on 2026-07-29 because the site is a JavaScript application that returns no readable content to a plain fetch. This is the search that answers whether the original patent reserved the minerals to the United States, which no county grantor and grantee index will tell you. The site also offers a map search and document type browsing. NOT READ HERE: whether coverage is complete for any particular state or county, and how a reservation is identified on the face of a specific patent image.

16 O.S. § 67(A)

Where the owner of a severed mineral interest in Oklahoma real estate has died, a person claiming that interest through a recorded affidavit of death and heirship acquires marketable title to it against adverse claimants, provided the statutory conditions are met, and so does a purchaser for value buying from such a claimant.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read in the same complete-title PDF. Subsection C sets the conditions and they are strict: the affidavit or recital must state that the decedent died without a will, or that a will was never probated in Oklahoma with a copy attached, or that the will was probated but the severed mineral interest was omitted from the final decree with the will and decree attached; it must list the heirs and their relationship to the decedent; and the maker must state that they are related to the decedent or otherwise have personal knowledge of the facts. The section is worth having because inherited severed minerals are the single most common way an Oklahoma mineral interest ends up with a clouded record, and this is the statutory route to clearing it. The remaining conditions in subsection C beyond those listed here were not read in full.

52 O.S. § 552(B)

Where royalties, bonus or other monies are payable under an Oklahoma pooling order and the people entitled to them are unknown or cannot be located after due diligence, the Corporation Commission requires the holder to put the money in an escrow account for the rightful recipient, and anyone proving identity and ownership must be paid promptly from it.

Checked July 30, 2026. Read in the Legislature's complete-title PDF for Title 52. This is the first unclaimed-proceeds rule on this record and it is a real answer to the question a mineral owner asks as "where is my missing royalty money". Section 552 requires the escrow account and requires reports within a year of the pooling order giving the owner's name and last known address, the legal description of the interest, the account details and the date of the order. Section 554 then routes the money onward: the Commission transmits funds to the State Treasurer by the close of the second working day after receipt, the Treasurer holds them in trust in the Mineral Owner's Fund, the names go into the Treasurer's regular annual process for locating owners of unclaimed property, and claims are made to the Treasurer, who pays a proven owner or their heirs, devisees or assigns. The Commission retains ten percent of transferred funds to cover administration. The Corporation Commission separately publishes a searchable MOEA database; this record has not read anything stating what that abbreviation expands to or how that database relates to these sections, so the two are recorded separately rather than as one thing.