The estate holds minerals. Here is the executor’s order of work.

The seven jobs, in order

1. Find every interest

   Minerals hide. Start with tax tickets in the decedent’s name in every county they or their parents lived in, royalty check stubs, old deeds, and letters from companies. Then run a free screening on the decedent’s name and each county: it lists the interests the county records point to, including ones the family forgot.

2. Keep the tax tickets current

   Tell each county assessor the owner has died and where to send the ticket, and ask the sheriff whether any year is unpaid. An estate that takes two years to settle is long enough for a mineral interest to go delinquent and be sold. Mineral taxes explains what to check.

3. List them in the appraisement

   Mineral interests are real property and belong on the estate’s inventory with the county, district, tract, and fraction, as the records describe them. Where the estate needs a value, a producing interest is usually valued from its royalties and a non-producing one from the market; an appraiser does that, and research from a buyer, including ours, is not an appraisal.

4. Collect what operators are holding

   If a well produces under any tract, the operator has either been paying the decedent or holding the money in suspense since the mail bounced. Call its owner relations desk with your letters of appointment; it pays the estate until the minerals are distributed. Search the state’s unclaimed property site too. Getting paid walks through it.

5. Settle who gets what

   Under a will, the devisees named in it; without one, the heirs under West Virginia law, in shares. Where a grandparent’s estate was never settled, the decedent may only have owned a share of what the family assumed. The family tree review works that out with the evidence labeled.

6. Move the minerals with the right paper

   The probated will or the recorded list of heirs is the document that connects the heirs to the decedent in the county records. Many fiduciaries also record a short deed from the estate to the heirs so the next title search is clean, and so the assessor and the operators change their records in one step. Ask the attorney handling the estate which is right here.

7. Distribute, or sell once and split

   Five heirs can each receive a fraction and decide separately, or the estate can sell the whole interest and distribute cash. Selling from the estate needs authority in the will or from the court. Selling after distribution needs every heir’s signature. Either way, the written offer states what is being sold and to whom the money goes.

Documents the operators, the assessor, and a buyer will ask for

• Death certificateEveryone asks for it first.
• Letters of appointmentLetters testamentary or of administration from the county, proving you act for the estate.
• The will, as probatedOr, with no will, the recorded list of heirs. This is what changes the names on the records.
• Each heir’s detailsName, address, and tax ID, for the operators’ division orders and for any deed.
• The decedent’s mineral papersDeeds, old tax tickets, statements, and letters. Photos are fine; nobody expects them sorted.
• Any offer the estate receivesBuyers write to estates. An offer is useful context; it is not a valuation, and there is no deadline on an estate.