My dad was a landman/lease broker/investor in the 1960s to 1980s. He owned numerous royalty and mineral interests, mostly in WY, but also TX and maybe other states as well. He died testate in 2001 and my mother was the executor of his estate and heir of his property. My mother died testate in 2010 and a cousin of mine was the executor and heir of her property. I was recently contacted with an offer to purchase an ORRI on a lease in Converse county, WY that was owned by my dad since 1972. As far as I knew, the ownership of that had passed to my mother and then on to my cousin, but I remembered while researching this that there had been discussions years ago that prior to his death, my dad may have put some ownership of mineral rights and/or royalty interests in my name and possibly my brother’s name(also deceased). The only list of his property that he owned that I have is the schedule of mineral and royalty interests that passed to my mother at his death, but this doesn’t seem to be useful to me because the ownership of that appears clear(now belonging to my cousin). How can I research if there are interests or royalties that I might own because they were deeded to me directly from my dad many years ago(perhaps in the form of life estates). I’m willing to do research on my own if that is feasible, but I also understand that I have fairly limited knowledge of the industry and perhaps there are more efficient ways to search.
If I’m understanding right, you think your father may have given some mineral interests to you before he died. Assuming he did that by deed and the deeds were recorded in the states where those mineral interests are located it sounds like you need to research the deed record grantor/grantee indexes in the county clerk offices for the states and counties where you think those deeds may have been recorded.
Don’t know about WY but in Texas you can do that online at sites like www.texasfile.com or www.courthousedirect.com. You will need to sign up for an account but there is no charge to check the indexes. If you find deeds in your name as grantee, or your father’s as grantor, that you want to look at you can preview them for a couple of dollars each and decide if they are worth buying. I expect some other states may have similar web sites, and in some cases the county clerk’s offices themselves have their records online. But most of those sites don’t go back as far as the 1980’s. Locating deeds recorded earlier than that would require going to the courthouses to do your research.
You said that the only records showing where the mineral interests your father owned were located covered the interests that passed to your mother. Unless you can come up with some other starting point, like records showing areas where he worked or companies he worked for, I don’t know how you could decide which counties you needed to focus on. If nothing else, you might start by trying the states and counties where the mineral interests your mother received were located and see if there were others in those same counties that he might have transferred to you or your brother.