If you own land in America, you have to file your deed or mineral grant or oil & gas lease or assignment or final account or quit claim deed or w/e down at the County Clerk\’s Office. (Not to be confused with the Court Clerk\’s Office).
When you file your instrument, they take a photocopy of it and record it in whatever Volume, at whatever Page, and then they index it against the appropriate lands. The books pictured are those volumes, and they contain anywhere from 300-900 pages each. This particular county has OVER FIVE THOUSAAAAAAAAAAAND volumes on the shelves.
In order to find out who currently owns a certain tract of land, at least in Oklahoma, you have to go way back in the day to inception. That\’s when the US government marched a bunch of injun peoples down here and parceled out the land in 160 acre tracts to them. Then you just follow the chain of title to the present day.
I know how to do this, so I use a legal pad and a pencil, but there are people in there making $200/day simply taking pictures of the documents and giving them to people like myself who can figure out the ownership of the surface and minerals and leasehold.
If you have no job and you own a good digital camera, go hang out at your local county courthouse and look for people who are doing this and tell them that natedog said to give you a job.
Isle of view.
I see what you did there. I think you mean aisle though.
Nope, meant isle.
What happened to the “post must be funny, stupid or cool and not contain more than 100 words or something”.
sorry dude. i’ll give up my totally uncool job to go stand behind a popcorn counter, giving america diabeetus and tooth decay
I’m just saying, what’s the point of this?
Oh wait, there was an extremely long paragraph that was tl;dr.
Nevermind.
I saw. I tried. I was tazed.
Thanks natedog.
Y’know, given the size of a standard deed (which is, admittedly, much smaller than the whole mortgage, etc.), a single county having 4.5 million pages of property ownership documentation covering its’ entire history is not surprising.
natedog, you go by natedog in your professional life?
well, “natedog” is not on my business card, but everyone at work calls me that…
and a deed can be pretty lengthy, even if the deed itself is one page. alot of times there are 20-30 pages of land descriptions in the exhibits
i posted pics of a trophy i won from work that has “natedog” on it
Interesting – Thanks for sharing.
What ever happened to online data? But yeah, natedog, you’re helping! Nothing wrong with that.
there are alot of online resources for Landmen, but most counties are not online. and the ones that are don’t go back too awful far, so you have to go to the courthouse most of the time.
but it’s cool. they pay me 58.5 cents/mile and $25 per diem for foods and shit
I am a “landman” too. . .Sometimes referred to as a “book-looker”. . .Louisville, KY area. . .