How to find out who owns the mineral rights

AS 40.17.010

The Department of Natural Resources must provide, at each public office it designates, the documents and indices or alternative document retrieval system of the recording district or districts served by that office, a machine or system to retrieve stored documents, a means of making copies together with a person authorised to certify them, and instructions explaining to the public the formal requirements a document must satisfy to be recorded. The department provides the staff and equipment to receive, record and permanently store documents, and the recorder must give reasonable public access during business hours to recorded documents, indices and the facilities. Where rapid recording and retrieval and secure storage can be provided for all recording districts from one place, the recorder records the documents at a single place in the state the department designates.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at section 40.17.010. Every other state page on this record ends the ownership question in the same place, which is the county recorder or county clerk. Alaska has no counties. Land records are kept by recording districts run by the state Department of Natural Resources, and the statute contemplates consolidating all of them into a single place of recording once the technology allows. For a reader that changes the practical answer to "where do I go and look": not to a courthouse in the borough, but to the state's recording offices and their indices. It also means the same department that holds the mineral estate reserved in the deeds holds the deeds. This record states that as a structural fact and not as a criticism, and it has not read anything about how the department separates the two functions.

Ark. Code Ann. § 15-74-101

A division order is the document that tells a royalty owner what fraction of a well the payor believes they own, and in most states its contents are whatever the payor chooses to put in it. Arkansas legislates them. Ark. Code 15-74-101(a) requires all division orders, and any declaration of interest in gas, between the purchaser of gas production and the owner of the production, or between purchasers or the owner and the royalty interest owners, to contain five things ON THE FIRST PAGE: the name and address of the owner of royalties; a space for the owner's social security or tax identification number, the other information needed to meet the requirements of the Internal Revenue Service or other governmental agencies, and a space for the owner's signature; the acreage under which the royalty owner has an interest and the fractional or decimal interest the royalty owner owns in the pool; the TOTAL AMOUNT OF NET MINERAL ACRES in the area subject to the division order; and the effective date of the division order. The fourth of those is the one worth the section, because a decimal interest on its own cannot be checked by anybody. Given the total net mineral acres in the unit and the acreage the owner holds an interest under, a royalty owner can do the division themselves and see whether the decimal they have been sent is right. Read with Ark. Code 15-72-305(a)(2), which allocates production to each tract in the proportion its area bears to the total area of the drilling unit, the two together let an owner reconstruct the arithmetic. The limit is the same one that runs through the Arkansas gas provisions: subsection (b) excludes any producing unit or well that produces liquid hydrocarbons only, liquid hydrocarbons associated with the production of gas, or gas produced in association with liquid hydrocarbons.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Ark. Code 15-74-101 on the verbatim mirror. It is filed here as a records rule rather than a payment rule because what it produces is a document a mineral owner can check their own ownership against, which is the same job the county indexes do from the other direction.

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.

HRS s. 501-82, Tenure of holder of certificate of title

Hawaii runs a second system beside the Regular System, statewide: land registered in the Land Court under chapter 501, which is a Torrens system. Every applicant receiving a certificate of title under a decree of registration, and every subsequent purchaser of registered land who takes a certificate for value and in good faith, holds free from all encumbrances except those noted on the certificate in the order of priority of recordation, and except nine subsisting encumbrances the section lists: federal liens and rights the State cannot require to appear of record, unpaid real property taxes, state tax liens recorded in the Bureau of Conveyances, public highways and certain private ways, a lease coupled with occupancy for a term not exceeding one year, liability to assessments for betterments and certain statutory liabilities, the possibility of the decree being reversed on appeal, certain leasehold time share encumbrances, and recorded money judgments. None of the nine is a mineral interest.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at HRS s. 501-82 on 2026-08-02, the section in full, 7,330 characters, containing zero occurrences of mineral, sever, oil, gas or geothermal, against controls of easement 2 and lien 11. This is the second state on this record with exactly this shape, and it stops in exactly the same place as the first. Minnesota's s. 508.25 lists seven exceptions, none of them a mineral interest, and the Minnesota page deliberately declines to conclude that registration cuts off a severed interest that was missed. So does this one, for the same reason: what has NOT been read is the registration proceeding itself, where the answer actually lives, because a decree follows notice and adjudication and a severed interest would ordinarily be noted on the certificate at registration. The live question is what happens to one that was not, and no Hawaii decision on it was read. What is worth knowing without any decision is that the two systems run side by side in one office, so a Hawaii searcher has to establish which system a parcel is in before the search means anything, and subsection (b) tells them what a sufficient notation looks like: a reference to a document by name or number plus an indication that the referenced document contains an encumbrance.

Idaho Code s. 55-811, Record as notice

Every conveyance of real property acknowledged or proved, and certified, and recorded as prescribed by law, is constructive notice of its contents to subsequent purchasers and mortgagees from the time it is filed with the recorder for record. The second paragraph of the same section does something a searcher needs to know about and would not guess. Where a recorded conveyance was executed by somebody who only afterwards acquired an interest in the property, by a later conveyance that is itself constructive notice, the earlier conveyance becomes constructive notice of its contents to subsequent purchasers and mortgagees from the time that later conveyance is filed. So a grant made too early is not simply void as against the world: it springs into notice when the grantor's own title arrives on the record.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at Idaho Code 55-811 on 2026-08-03. The second paragraph was added by 1935 ch. 107 and amended in 1941, and it is after-acquired title expressed through the recording system rather than through estoppel. It matters for minerals more than for most interests because of how severances happen: a mineral deed given by somebody whose own title was defective, or who held under an unrecorded chain, is exactly the instrument this paragraph rescues, and it rescues it against later purchasers rather than only between the parties. For a searcher the practical consequence is that a mineral conveyance recorded BEFORE the grantor appears in the chain is not noise to be skipped over. WHAT IS NOT READ: any Idaho decision applying the second paragraph, and how title examiners in Idaho handle a mineral deed recorded ahead of its grantor's own deed.

Ky. Rev. Stat. § 382.110

Deeds, mortgages and other instruments that must be recorded to be effectual against purchasers without notice or against creditors are recorded in the county clerk's office of the county where the property, or the greater part of it, lies. A county clerk may not admit to record any deed conveying an interest equal to or greater than a life estate unless the deed plainly specifies and refers to the immediate source from which the grantor derived title. Where that source is a recorded writing the deed must give the office, book and page and the date of recording; where the title came by inheritance or otherwise, the deed must state clearly how and from whom the grantor got it, and where it came from two or more sources the deed must show which part came from each. A grantor may not lodge a deed that does not comply, and the clerk may not receive one, but a deed is not invalid because it was lodged contrary to the section. Each county clerk keeps an alphabetical cross-index of all conveyances and must enter the parties' names on it at once, before any other business, and record the instrument within six days.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read as the per-section PDFs the Kentucky General Assembly publishes for KRS 382.110 and KRS 382.200, extracted with pdftotext -layout; the database states it was last updated 07/30/2026 and includes enactments through the 2026 Regular Session. The source-of-title requirement is the part worth knowing, because it does work no other recording provision on this record does: it makes the chain of title self-linking, so a Kentucky deed recorded since March 20, 1928 should itself name the deed it came out of and give the book and page. For anyone walking a severed mineral chain backwards that turns a search into a series of pointers rather than a hunt through an index. Note the limits exactly. The duty falls on the drafter and the clerk, and subsection (8) says in terms that a deed is not invalid because it was lodged contrary to the section, so a defective reference does not unwind the conveyance; subsection (7) relieves the clerk of the statutory fine for erroneous or false references. The section does not apply to deeds by a court commissioner, sheriff or court officer, or to any deed made and acknowledged before March 20, 1928, which is the period a great many Kentucky mineral severances date from. WHAT IS NOT READ: the fee schedule, the electronic recording provisions at KRS 382.075 to 382.077, and whether any Kentucky county maintains a tract index in addition to the statutory alphabetical cross-index.

Md. Code, Real Property s. 3-202, Possession as constructive notice

If a grantee under an unrecorded deed is in possession of the land and that possession is inconsistent with the record title, the possession constitutes constructive notice of what an inquiry of the possessor would disclose as to the existence of the unrecorded deed. Maryland puts into one sentence of statute what most states leave to case law: the duty of inquiry, its trigger, and the extent of what a purchaser is fixed with. The trigger is possession inconsistent with the record title, so possession that matches the record raises nothing. And the extent is defined by what asking would have revealed rather than by what the unrecorded deed says, so a purchaser is charged with the answer to a question they did not ask.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at Md. Code, Real Property s. 3-202 on 2026-08-03, and it is the section 3-203 makes one of its four conditions turn on. Set it against Oregon, read the day before, because the two states legislate on the same doctrine and point it in opposite directions. Oregon's ORS 93.710 provides that recording a mineral interest is notice to third persons IRRESPECTIVE OF WHETHER the grantee is in possession, which is a rule written to protect the severed mineral owner, who is never in possession of anything. Maryland's 3-202 goes the other way and makes possession itself a source of notice, which is a rule that protects an unrecorded grantee who is on the ground. Neither helps a severed mineral owner who is neither recorded nor in possession, but the drafting tells you which problem each legislature had in mind. For a Maryland mineral searcher the practical consequence is narrower than it looks: a severed mineral interest almost never involves possession inconsistent with the record title, so 3-202 rarely reaches minerals, and the four condition rule in 3-203 does the work. WHAT IS NOT READ: any Maryland decision on how far the inquiry duty extends.

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.

Minn. Stat. § 508.25

A person receiving a certificate of title under a decree of registration, and every subsequent purchaser of registered land taking a certificate in good faith and for valuable consideration, holds it free from all encumbrances and adverse claims except those noted in the last certificate of title and except seven enumerated rights: federal law liens and rights the state cannot require to appear of record, real property tax and special assessment liens, leases of not more than three years where there is actual occupation, rights in public highways, rights of appeal or to contest the proceeding, the rights of a person in possession under a deed or contract for deed from the certificate owner, and outstanding mechanics lien rights.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at Minn. Stat. § 508.25, in full including the whole of the enumerated list. The text was fetched and read, so the rule is verified; what is NOT settled is a conclusion this record is deliberately not drawing from it, and that is set out below and in not_covered rather than by weakening the confidence on a section that was read. Minnesota is a two-registry state and this section governs the Torrens half, so it matters here more than in any state read so far. The obvious question a mineral owner would ask is whether registration can wipe out a severed mineral interest that was never noted on the certificate. Two things point that way: the section says the holder takes free of all encumbrances and adverse claims other than what is noted, and none of the seven exceptions is a mineral or mining interest, which was established by reading the list to its end rather than by searching it. The complete table of sections for chapter 508 also contains no occurrence of the word mineral. But that is not enough to publish, and this record has been caught before by exactly this shape of reasoning. A Torrens decree follows notice and adjudication, so a severed interest would ordinarily be noted at registration, and the live question is what happens to one that was missed, which § 508.25 does not address. Chapter 508A was not examined. No Minnesota decision on the point has been read. Until those are done the honest statement is the one above: here is what the certificate does and here is what the exception list contains.

Miss. Code Ann. § 89-5-23

An expired lease that is still on the record is a cloud on a mineral title, and it is the single most common reason a Mississippi mineral owner cannot lease again or sell. Miss. Code 89-5-23(1) puts the burden on the person who benefited from the lease rather than on the owner. Whenever any oil, gas and mineral lease recorded in any county of the state expires or terminates, the holder of the lease, or the last assignee of record, SHALL BE REQUIRED to cancel it of record. Two ways are given. The holder may enter on the margin of the record of the lease a notation that it has terminated and expired, attested by the chancery clerk, which discharges and releases the land described from the lease. Or the holder may execute a separate recordable instrument stating that the lease has expired and terminated and that no further rights or claims will be asserted under it. The clerk's fee is one dollar, the cancellation need not be indexed on the sectional index, but the clerk must note the cancellation on the margin of the record where the lease is recorded, and where a separate instrument is used must note there the book and page of that instrument. Subsection (2) supplies the deadline and the consequence of missing it: the obligation bites if the holder or last assignee of record does not act within ONE MONTH after the lease expires or terminates. The section is worth knowing from both directions. A mineral owner whose lease has run out should not assume the record cleared itself, and should check the margin of the recorded lease rather than the index.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from Miss. Code 89-5-23 on the verbatim mirror. This is the ONLY appearance of the word mineral in the whole thirty-two section recording chapter, which is itself the evidence for the negative stated elsewhere on this page. What subsection (2) provides beyond the one month deadline, in particular the measure of any liability for failing to cancel, was read but is not summarised in detail here.

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.

Neb. Rev. Stat. § 57-205

When a recorded oil, gas or other mineral lease on Nebraska land becomes forfeited, the lessee or their successors must, within thirty days of the forfeiture, have the lease surrendered in writing, signed, acknowledged and placed on record in the county where the land lies, without cost to the owner. If they do not, the landowner may serve a notice in a form the statute sets out, in person, by registered or certified letter to the last known address, or by publication for one week in a newspaper of general circulation in the county, declaring the lease forfeited and demanding a recorded surrender within ten days, and warning that an affidavit of forfeiture will otherwise be filed with the register of deeds. If the lease owner still refuses, the owner of the leased premises may sue for the surrender and recover one hundred dollars in damages, all costs, a reasonable attorney's fee for preparing and prosecuting the suit, and any additional damages the evidence warrants.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at sections 57-201, 57-202 and 57-205. This is the answer to a problem a mineral owner meets long before any question about dormancy: an expired lease still sitting on the record, making the interest hard to lease again. Nebraska gives a form of notice, a ten day deadline, a filed affidavit of forfeiture, and then a suit with fee shifting and a fixed sum of damages. Note who it protects. The sections speak of the owner of the land and the owner of the leased premises, which in a severed estate is the mineral owner as lessor, and this record has not read anything deciding how they apply where the surface and the minerals are in different hands. The lessee's counter is also in the chapter: section 57-204 lets a lessee notify the register of deeds that the lease has not been forfeited, and what that does to the landowner's affidavit has not been read here.

N.J.S.A. § 46:26A-6(b), with §§ 46:26A-2, 46:26A-5, 46:26A-8 and 46:26A-9

The mechanics of a New Jersey title search are set by the Recording Act of 2011, and four of its sections decide what a mineral searcher can actually do. N.J.S.A. 46:26A-8(a) requires the county recording officer to maintain ONE INDEX OF ALL RECORDED DOCUMENTS, and permits other separate, classified, analytical or combination indexes on top of it. That is the opposite of the pattern several states on this record use, where minerals sit in a book of their own that a deed search never opens: Oregon keeps a Mineral and Mining Record, and Vermont a separate mines and quarries book. In New Jersey a mineral deed is indexed in the same place as everything else, by the names of its grantors and grantees under 46:26A-8(b). Subsection (g) is the one an heir needs: a document shall also be indexed by ADDITIONAL NAMES requested by the person submitting it, if an affidavit is presented at the time attesting to facts establishing the specific relationship of the names to the document and the need for the extra indexing. So a mineral deed running to a maiden name, a misspelling or an estate can be made findable under the name a searcher will actually try. N.J.S.A. 46:26A-2 fixes what may be recorded and it is deliberately wide: sixteen enumerated classes plus subsection (p), any other document that affects title to any interest in real property IN ANY WAY or contains any agreement in relation to real property or grants any right or interest in real property, and subsection (q), anything another statute or a court orders recorded. Leases for a term of not less than two years are recordable under (c), and options and rights of first refusal under (g), which is how a mineral lease and a mineral option get onto the record. N.J.S.A. 46:26A-6 supplies the timing that makes a search reliable: every document or map SHALL BE RECORDED AND INDEXED NOT LATER THAN TWO BUSINESS DAYS after receipt, and a rejected document must be returned within three business days WITH A STATEMENT OF ALL GROUNDS for the rejection, which stops a recording office rejecting the same instrument twice for different reasons. Recording is in the order received under 46:26A-9. And N.J.S.A. 46:26A-5 carries a detail worth budgeting for: a document may be accompanied by a cover sheet or electronic synopsis carrying the parties, the lot and block, the consideration and the grantee's address, and if the submitter does not include one THE RECORDING OFFICE SHALL CHARGE AN ADDITIONAL FEE OF $20 for the extra cost of indexing.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from N.J.S.A. 46:26A-6(b), with 46:26A-2, 46:26A-5, 46:26A-8 and 46:26A-9, on the verbatim mirror, chapter walked end to end, twelve sections. The Oregon and Vermont comparisons were taken from those states' own entries on this record. What was not read is any county recording officer's own fee schedule or search interface, so this page states the statutory duty and says nothing about what any particular New Jersey county's records actually look like online.

P.L.2024, c.88, approved November 1, 2024, amending P.L.2021, c.371 (N.J.S.A. 47:1B-1 et seq.)

This is the newest thing on this page and the mirror cannot see it, so it is cited to the enrolled act itself. P.L.2024, c.88, approved 1 NOVEMBER 2024, amended New Jersey's address redaction law, P.L.2021 c.371 (C.47:1B-1 et seq.), which requires public agencies to redact the home addresses of covered persons such as judges, prosecutors and law enforcement officers from public records. The amendment matters to anyone searching New Jersey land records because it settles how the redaction duty meets the recording act. The act provides that a document affecting the title to real property AS DEFINED BY N.J.S.46:26A-2, recorded and indexed by a county recording officer, that contains an address subject to redaction, may instead or in addition have the names or other information of approved covered persons redacted as the Director of the Division of Taxation specifies. It then lists what the redaction requirement does not reach, and two entries on that list are the ones to read: (f) THE INDEX OF ALL RECORDED DOCUMENTS MAINTAINED BY A COUNTY RECORDING OFFICER AS UNDER N.J.S.46:26A-8, WHEN INSPECTED IN PERSON; and (g) property that is presumed abandoned under the Uniform Unclaimed Property Act, P.L.1989, c.58 (C.46:30B-1 et seq.). So the single index that 46:26A-8 requires, which is the index a mineral title search actually runs on, is exempt from redaction when it is inspected IN PERSON, and the qualifier is doing work. The act also provides that where a record is only available to be viewed in person because of its characteristics, a custodian shall make every reasonable effort to HIDE such an address when letting somebody without authority view it. And the unclaimed property records are exempt outright, which is why a royalty owner searching the State database for their own suspended money is not searching a redacted list. WHAT THIS DOES NOT DO is change the text of the recording act. Neither 46:26A nor 46:30B nor 46:3 was amended by it; the mirror's text of those chapters is still accurate. What changed is what a searcher will be shown.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from the enrolled text of P.L.2024, c.88 (A4706 1R) on the Legislature's own host, which is a .us domain and therefore official tier, so this rule has BETTER sourcing than the rest of the page rather than worse. It was found by enumerating every chapter law of 2024 and reading each one in full, NOT by searching, and that distinction is the point: the Legislature's bill search matches synopses only, and a search of the 2024-2025 session for 'unclaimed property' returns three bills of which this is not one, because c.88's synopsis is about the Stay NJ property tax benefit program. No currency is recorded on this source because an enrolled act makes no currency claim. What was not read is any regulation of the Director of the Division of Taxation made under it, or any county recording officer's practice.

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.C. Gen. Stat. s. 1-42, Possession follows legal title; severance of surface and subsurface rights

Where the public records show that the surface and subsurface were at some previous time separated, neither side may prove adverse possession against the other out of any use of the other's estate. The holder of the subsurface cannot evidence any use of the surface, by itself, its predecessors, lessees or agents, as adverse possession against the surface owner, and the surface owner cannot evidence any use of the subsurface against the subsurface owner. The only way past that bar is a brief notice of intended use recorded with the register of deeds, in a book kept for the purpose, at the time the allegedly adverse use begins and IN EACH YEAR OF IT, giving four things: the date of beginning or recommencing, a description adequate to locate the property, the name and if known the address of the claimant of the right, and the deed or other instrument under which the right is claimed.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at G.S. 1-42 on 2026-08-02. Two things make this worth publishing. It is symmetrical, which nothing else read here is: a surface owner working the minerals and a mineral owner using the surface are in exactly the same position, and both are barred by default. And the annual repetition is a real requirement, not a formality, because the section says the notice must be placed on record at the time of beginning the use and in each year of the same. The book this section provides for is the same book the nine extinguishment sections send their preservation notices to, and the same book the tax listing notice in those sections goes to, so it is a separate index a searcher has to ask for by name and would not find in the grantor and grantee indices. The first paragraph of the same section carries an ordinary presumption that a person with legal title was in possession, and adds that a record chain of title for thirty years before the action is prima facie evidence of possession. The section reached its present form through 1945, 1959 and 1965 amendments, the last of them in the same year as the first extinguishment statute. What was not read: whether any notice of intended use has ever been recorded anywhere, and any decision construing the section.

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.

ORS s. 93.710, Instruments or memoranda creating certain interests in realty

To give constructive notice of an interest in real property, a person must have documentation of the interest recorded in the indices maintained under ORS 205.130 in the county where the property is located, and that recordation, and no other record, constitutes constructive notice to any person of the existence of the interest, subject to a listed set of exceptions covering property tax, statutory liens, certain public improvement and utility chapters, local government charters, and a city's online governmental lien record. Alongside that, an instrument creating an oil, gas or other mineral interest or estate in real property, or a memorandum of it, may be indexed and recorded in the deed records of the county, and such recordation constitutes notice to third persons of the rights of the parties under the instrument irrespective of whether the party granted the interest or estate is in possession of the real property.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at ORS 93.643(1) and 93.710(1) on 2026-08-02. The second of those is aimed squarely at the thing that makes a severed mineral interest different from every other interest in land: its owner is never in possession, so any doctrine that runs notice off possession can never help them. The clause was put there by 1963 c.416 s.1 and it names oil, gas and other mineral interests expressly. The first is worth as much to a searcher and for a different reason: a statute saying in terms that the county index AND NO OTHER RECORD gives constructive notice tells you that a search which covers those indices is complete, subject only to the listed exceptions, and that a document lodged anywhere else is not charged against you. The exceptions are the qualification and they are real, including a city's electronic lien record, which is expressly made the controlling lien record to the exclusion of any informational recording in the county indices. WHAT IS NOT READ: the indices themselves, whether Oregon counties maintain a consolidated index or separate deed and mortgage books under ORS 93.610, and any Oregon decision on the reach of 93.643.

ORS s. 205.246, Instruments to be recorded; fees

Oregon county clerks keep a separate record called the Mineral and Mining Record. The statute listing the instruments a county clerk must record names it and names exactly which sections feed it: mineral and mining records required under ORS 517.030, 517.052, 517.160, 517.180, 517.210, 517.220, 517.280, 517.310 and 517.320. Read those nine back and the contents are lode claim location notices, placer claim location notices, millsite locations, the dormancy statement of claim together with the notice and affidavit of publication that extinguishes an interest, annual assessment work affidavits, the evidentiary effect of those affidavits, the certificate transferring a delinquent co-owner's interest, the recording and indexing of that certificate, and a judgment in a quiet title suit between co-owners. The clerk must also, when possible, indicate by marginal notation on the instrument that created the original mineral interest that a statement of claim or a notice and affidavit of publication has been recorded, and must cross-reference a statement of claim in the Mineral and Mining Record under both the current holder's name and the original holder's name.

Checked August 2, 2026. Read at ORS 205.246(1)(s) and 517.180(9) on 2026-08-02, with ORS 205.130 for the clerk's general recording duties and the indices. The practical consequence is the reason this is a rule rather than a footnote: in Oregon the document that establishes whether a mineral interest was extinguished, or preserved, is not in the deed records, and a title search that reads the deed and mortgage books and stops has not looked in the right place. North Carolina's G.S. 1-42 book is the other named special book on this record and it holds something different, the yearly notices of intended use that stop adverse possession running across a severance. The marginal notation is the searcher's friend and the words WHEN POSSIBLE are the searcher's problem: it is not guaranteed, so a clean margin on the severing deed proves nothing. WHAT IS NOT READ: whether Oregon counties actually maintain the Mineral and Mining Record as a distinct index today or fold it into a consolidated index, how far back it runs, and how it is searched online in any particular county.

S.C. Code s. 30-7-90, Notice of unrecorded instrument

No possession of real property described in any instrument of writing required by law to be recorded shall operate as notice of that instrument. Actual notice is deemed and held sufficient to supply the place of registration only when the notice is of the instrument itself, or of its nature and purport. Two rules in two sentences, and both of them cut against a person holding an unrecorded interest. The first abolishes the whole doctrine that occupying land puts a later purchaser on inquiry: in South Carolina somebody living on the ground, farming it or working it tells a purchaser nothing in law about a deed that was never recorded. The second narrows what actual notice means, so a purchaser who knew vaguely that somebody else claimed something is not fixed with notice; the knowledge has to be of the instrument, or at least of its nature and purport.

Checked August 3, 2026. Read at S.C. Code s. 30-7-90 on 2026-08-03. 1962 Code s. 60-109, tracing back through the 1942, 1932, 1922, 1912 and 1902 codes to 1888. THIS IS THE EXACT INVERSE OF MARYLAND, read the same day, whose Real Property s. 3-202 provides that a grantee under an unrecorded deed who is in possession inconsistently with the record title gives constructive notice of what an inquiry of the possessor would disclose. Same doctrine, same subject, opposite answers, and both states legislated rather than leaving it to the courts. Oregon is the third state here that has legislated on possession and notice, and it did the job for a different party again: ORS 93.710 makes the recording of a mineral interest notice IRRESPECTIVE OF whether the grantee is in possession. What South Carolina's rule means for minerals is worth stating because it happens to run the right way. A severed mineral owner is never in possession of anything and could not be without drilling or mining, so a rule that makes possession a source of notice never helps them; abolishing it costs them nothing and removes a route by which a surface occupier might otherwise defeat them. The cost falls on the holder of any unrecorded interest, which is the group this statute is aimed at. WHAT IS NOT READ: any South Carolina decision on how much knowledge amounts to notice of an instrument's NATURE AND PURPORT, which is the phrase the second sentence turns on.

SDCL 45-6C-55, Confidentiality period of certain mineral exploration reports

South Dakota starts from disclosure and carves out exceptions, rather than starting from secrecy. Information provided to state agencies in a notice of intent to conduct exploration is public information, with the tentative test hole locations the protected exception and disclosure of protected material a misdemeanour. Well data is on a timer: the board may require mechanical well logs, directional surveys and reports on well location, drilling and production to be filed within thirty days after a well is completed or abandoned, and samples, core chips and complete cores within six months, but the log, samples and cores of an exploratory or wildcat well may be held confidential, on the operator's written request, only until six months after the well is completed. Older exploration filings were put on the same footing retrospectively: geologic reports, aquifer penetration reports, maps and test hole logs from operations initiated or permitted before July 1982 were made confidential for six months following July 1, 2008, extendable by written request for no more than five further years, after which the statute says the information becomes public.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read at SDCL 45-6C-14, 45-6C-55, 45-6D-67 and 45-9-18 on 2026-08-04. The two confidentiality-period sections are word for word identical, enacted once each into the mineral exploration and uranium exploration chapters by SL 2008, ch 229. This is the far end of a spread this record has now seen three points on: Delaware makes exploration data confidential and criminalises the official who discloses it, Massachusetts makes a coal explorer publish its results after a hundred and eighty days, and South Dakota makes the filing public to begin with.

T.C.A. § 67-5-804(b), with § 67-5-809

Tennessee runs two separate registers that a mineral owner has to appear in, and appearing in the familiar one does not put you in the other. The register of deeds holds the instruments, and under T.C.A. 66-5-108(f) also keeps a book called the Dormant Mineral Interest Record for statements of claim and lapse orders. Separately, T.C.A. 67-5-804(b) requires all mineral owners to identify their mineral interests with the PROPERTY ASSESSOR of the county where the interest is located, supplying a deed reference number and specifying where the mineral estate lies by citing the tax maps and parcel numbers of the surface owners above it. The state board of equalization is required to furnish assessors a form for mineral owners to use. This is not a formality: T.C.A. 67-5-809(b) subjects a mineral owner who failed to register within three years of 1 July 1987 to back assessment or reassessment and a penalty of twenty five percent, and 67-5-809(c) levies a ten percent penalty on the current assessment of an owner who is paying tax but has not identified the location. There is one relieving provision worth knowing. Under 67-5-809(a), if the tax collector has not previously given notice to the owner of a dormant mineral interest that the interest was being assessed, there is no back assessment, and the owner is liable only for taxes accruing after 1 July 1987.

Checked August 4, 2026. Read on 2026-08-04 from T.C.A. 67-5-804(b) and 67-5-809 on the verbatim mirror. This rule and the dormancy trap on this page are two faces of the same requirement, and they are stated separately on purpose, because an owner can care about the penalties without knowing the interest is at risk and can care about the risk without ever having been penalised.

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.

Va. Code § 55.1-414

A purchaser is not affected by the record of a deed or contract made by a person under whom their title is not derived, nor by the record of a deed or contract made by someone under whom their title IS derived if that person made it before acquiring the legal title of record. Where two or more writings about the same property are recorded in the same county or city on the same day and stamped with the identical time, the instrument number decides which was first, and the first recorded has priority. Writings are recorded in the county for property outside the corporate limits of a city having a court where writings may be recorded, and in the city for property inside those limits.

Checked July 31, 2026. Read at sections 55.1-414, 55.1-410 and 55.1-411. This is the rule that tells a title searcher where the search stops, and it is the same proposition North Dakota states, worded differently: the record only charges you with what is in your own chain. The wild-deed half is the second clause, which excludes an instrument made by a predecessor before that predecessor took legal title of record, so an estoppel-by-deed argument does not get in through the recording act. The same-day tie-breaker is a modern provision and worth knowing because it is mechanical: identical time stamps are resolved by instrument number, not by proof of who arrived first. WHAT IS NOT READ: the indexing provisions in Title 55.1 Chapter 6, which govern how the clerk indexes what is recorded, and any Virginia decision applying section 55.1-414.

RCW 65.08.030, Recorded irregular instrument imparts notice

An instrument purporting to convey or encumber real estate or any interest in it, which has been recorded in the county auditor's office, imparts the same notice to third persons from the date of recording as if it had been executed, acknowledged and recorded exactly as the law in force at the time required, even though it was not. The same rule now applies to a tangible copy of an electronic record that was never certified by a notarial officer as the statute requires. For anyone tracing a mineral severance this cuts one way only: a defect in the old deed that severed the minerals does not make the deed invisible, and a searcher cannot treat a badly executed instrument in the chain as though it were not there.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at RCW 65.08.030 on 2026-08-01, both subsections. The section is headed Recorded irregular instrument imparts notice and traces to 1929, with subsection (2) added by 2019 c 154 s 8 to cover tangible copies of electronic records. Note the limit of what it does: it cures the NOTICE consequences of a defective execution, so the world is fixed with knowledge of the instrument. It does not say the instrument is valid, and nothing was read on whether a defectively executed conveyance is good between the parties or against anybody. Read this beside the priority rule rather than instead of it.

Wis. Stat. s. 706.05(3), Formal requisites for record, conveyances of mineral interests

Wisconsin makes the contents of a mineral deal public as the price of recording it. Every conveyance of mineral interests offered for record must fully disclose the terms and conditions of the agreement, including the financial arrangements and the exploration rights. The statute spells out what those include: the consideration exchanged, terms for payment, optional payments and royalty agreements on the money side, and the conditions and extent of any surface and subsurface rights, options to purchase further interests and options to conduct mining operations on the other. It must also fully disclose the parties, including any principal, parent corporation, partner or business associate with an interest, and directs that this be interpreted to provide maximum disclosure of any person with an economic interest in the transaction.

Checked August 1, 2026. Read at Wis. Stat. s. 706.05(3) on 2026-08-01. This reaches conveyances of mineral interests as narrowly defined, so metalliferous transactions, not every mineral deed. What it means in practice is that a Wisconsin landowner can look up what their neighbour was paid and who the ultimate corporate parent on the other side of the table is, which is ordinarily private commercial information. One thing that was not settled: s. 706.05(7) provides that an instrument the register of deeds accepts is duly recorded despite failing to conform to one or more of the section's requirements, provided it is properly indexed and recorded at length. How that interacts with a disclosure failure was not read, so nothing here says what happens to a conveyance recorded without the disclosure.

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.