What are my options for searching county records?

General Mineral Rights Discussion
1

I think it has come to the point where I need records searched in several Oklahoma counties where the records have not been digitized back far enough, or are behind an expensive paywall. For example, I am currently looking into something my mother apparently had mineral rights to in Pittsburg County. The only reference I have been able to find is a lease to Enron in 1995. What I want to find is the Mineral Deed that this lease was based on. This property was apparently never transferred into her trust so I need more details. But the records beyond about 1989 are not digitized.

Do I have to hire someone to do this? Or can I show up at the county offices and start going through thousands of pages of records? I don’t think a lot of money is involved here so it wouldn’t make sense to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for someone (a sandman?) to do this.

Any help would be appreciated.

D. Scruggs

2
  1. You can hire a landman to do the search or search the records yourself.
  2. You wouldn’t have to search thousands of pages of records. If you know the section, township and range the lease described, then you would search the index for that section. In other words, if the lease was for section 1-1n-1e, and then search the index for that section (only). It is chronological. So, you would go back from 1995.
  3. Have you searched okcountyrecords.com? It has records online. YOu could search for your mother’s name.
1 Like
4

If you are searching for the deed in your mother’s name, either online or when using the county’s Grantor/Grantee Index, try looking for variations in spelling. For instance, if her name was Aileen Houghton, look for variants of both names: Eileen, Ileen, Ilean, Elaine, Houton, Houghtan, Hooghtan, Houghten, Noughton, etc. - any possible spelling you can think of. Even look for reversed names, such as Houghton Aileen. Of course, the really old records were written out in longhand, introducing even more opportunities for spelling errors, both in the original entry and in transcriptions of the records and indexes. Several years back, my brother and I attempted to compile a list of every piece of property or mineral interest our granddad ever owned, We came came up with a list of fourteen different spellings in different legal documents - so many that we ended up filing an Affidavit of Identity and Fact in every county in which he owned interests attesting that all of these names referred to the same person. (For what it’s worth, we did further specify his identity by listing all of his descendants down to my brother and myself and by including his date of death and stating in which county his probate was filed.)

5

This is excellent information and needs to be posted again to the forum with a subject that could reach a larger audience. I would just add that if the lease was in the mother’s name then probate records must have been filed with the County Clerk or at least for someone in the family. However, sometimes probate orders are filed with the COURT Clerk, but don’t get filed with the land records in the COUNTY Clerk’s office. Probate records can be searched at https://www.oscn.net.dockets/Search.aspx#all.