How to find legal description of oil/mineral lease?

Law & Legal
1

I have a question on what legal description to use when transferring oil/mineral leases. We are using a quitclaim deed form but under legal description of the property I’m not sure what to put in. We have tax documents which list a description as:

LEASE ID 177312 OR 0.000064 GLAZE GAS UNIT 1 SW BONUS/JOSEPH NEWMAN SURVEY RRC: 177312

Will this work or do we need to find something that lists more details like: “… from abstract… page…”? If we need to list more details how do we find this? The oil/mineral leases are located in Wharton County, TX and I called the county clerk office but they will not confirm if I need a better description. I think I could research it if I visited the county clerk’s office but I live in WI so this is not feasible. The clerk’s office also mentioned about looking at a fee based online database. What is a good database that would likely have this information? Any help is much appreciated. The value of the oil leases are not much so I’m trying to avoid the cost of hiring an attorney and limit expensive research fees.

2

Paul:

I know this is a late reply and you've certainly figured out your issue by now, but thought I'd mention that from my observation, Texas' legal property listings traditionally include Survey, Section, Block, and Abstract label. I also understand there's been updates to this system recently to create shorter legal descriptions. You're correct that the full legal descriptions can be hard to find, as I've discovered with a mineral interest my mother owns in Upton Co., TX where the listing we have didn't include the section number. Here's a site I found where, if you know the county where the property is located, you can search with the info you have, and it appears to be free: http://www.earthpoint.us/texaslandsurveysearchbydescription.aspx

Angela