I have a situation for a mineral owner who had a very old probate filed in Seminole County Oklahoma. This owner also owned mineral rights in Grady County, but through various typos in the old probate, the probate was not filed in the Grady County Court clerk’s office. As such, we assumed intestate succession from the owner of the Grady County minerals. (This in fact was not the case, and the decedent had a will per Seminole County probate.) I purchased mineral rights from heirs in Grady County not knowing about this old Seminole County probate or about the will. In the case of probate conducted in another county, is “constructive notice” required in the chain of title for the Grady County mineral rights? The oil company is refusing to accept my title claims in Grady county.
Let me answer the question in a different way. Constructive notice doesn’t play a part here. For marketable title, one would have to have a probate or a quiet title suit as to the decedent’s interest. It appears you didn’t secure proof of that. A court ordered that the interest went to X. Therefore X owns it.
Agree 100% with Tim. You made a bad assumption. In the oil & gas business, as with most businesses, NEVER assume anything. Good Luck.
Thanks. I get the drift of your answer here. In this case, there actually was another combined probate that was done in Grady County, so I certainly thought I had proof. This second probate was done by another party, and without knowledge of the older first probate having been done in Seminole County. I presume that the original probate rules the day.
Adding to Tim’s comment which hes obviously correct on. The interesting part of this is your statement that you bought the heirs interest. Did you buy all of the heirs interest? Or were the grantors that you bought from not listed in the probate? If the heirs you bought from were listed in the probate, you should still have a claim to their rights, the net acres might not be as much as you thought you were getting, but thats on you as the buyer not doing your due dilligence.
I did not buy all the heirs interest. The will from the old Seminole County probate distributed things very differently than the much later Grady County (duplicate) probate that used intestate succession. The end result is that I ended up with nothing. The probate that was filed in Grady County should never have been filed, but I was not involved with that. However, the end result is that a complete title search using the Grady County land records was not sufficient to determine who the true heirs were. There were no “bad assumptions” on my part, and no “lack of due diligence”. Any landman working through the Grady County title would have come up with the same result, unless he decided to somehow interrogate the county clerk’s offices for every county in Oklahoma for the last 75 years. In fact, the oil company themselves had originally put me in pay status per their own title opinion. But somehow over time it came to their attention that an older probate, never filed in Grady County, was in existence in Seminole County from 75 years ago. I’m sure this is a rare occurrence, but it does point out some dangers. My only complaint here is there everything normal and reasonable was done to check title, and in the end, there was still a problem.
Interesting facts. Unfortunately, the second probate court didn’t have jurisdiction over this decedent’s interest. But it sounds like your actions were reasonable. I’m not sure you could have done anything differently.