How to Search North Dakota Mineral & Courthouse Records, Step by Step

Mineral ownership is established by recorded instruments — deeds, mineral deeds, probate decrees, leases — filed with the recorder of the county where the land sits. For the heart of the Bakken that means Williams County (Williston) and McKenzie County (Watford City). Records are indexed two ways: the tract index (every instrument touching a given section-township-range) and the grantor/grantee index(by party name). A proper ownership search runs the tract index from the present all the way back to the federal patent — often a century-plus of instruments, many handwritten. In person this is free but slow: plan a full day per section, more if the chain is messy. The recorder’s staff can pull documents but cannot do title research for you.

The North Dakota Industrial Commission’s Oil & Gas Division holds everything about wells: locations, operators, spacing units, permits, and production volumes. It won’t tell you who owns the minerals, but it tells you what’s being drilled and produced on them — which is what makes ownership worth confirming. Basic well data is public on the NDIC website; some detail sits behind a modest subscription. The crucial concept linking NDIC data to ownership is the spacing unit: in the Bakken, typically 1,280 acres across two sections, where every mineral owner in the unit shares in every well on it — so a well that isn’t on “your” section may still be paying your family.

Every North Dakota chain of title begins with the United States conveying the land — the federal patent. The Bureau of Land Management’s General Land Office records (searchable free at glorecords.blm.gov) show the original patentee and, importantly, whether the patent itself reserved minerals to the federal government — some homestead-era patents did, and those reservations still control today.

When a mineral owner dies, the interest moves by will or intestacy — but the county record only reflects it when a probate decree, personal representative’s deed, or heirship affidavit gets recorded. District court probate files (and out-of-state probates that were never brought to North Dakota) are where ownership chains most often break. If your tract search dead-ends at someone who died in 1974, the missing link is usually in a courthouse probate file — or was never created at all.

A complete mineral records search looks like this: (1) fix the legal description — section, township, range; (2) run the county tract index back to patent, reading every instrument for mineral language; (3) run the grantor/grantee index on every owner the chain surfaces, catching instruments indexed under other tracts; (4) check NDIC for wells and the spacing unit; (5) reconcile fractions until today’s owners and their net mineral acres add up. Landmen charge $300–$500 a day for this work, and a contentious section can eat a week. It’s honest, necessary work — the record is the truth — but almost none of it needs to be manual anymore.

Mineral Truth performs that whole workflow continuously: the complete Williams County record digitized, every instrument read and connected into live chains of title, wells and spacing units layered on from NDIC, and every figure linked to the scanned source document. One search — by legal description or by name — returns what the four-system manual search returns, with the receipts. New county recordings sync in weekly, so the answer stays current.