Ancestry Magazine

With the price of oil hovering at record highs, who wouldn’t want to inherit a little? And the best way to find out just whose roots tap into black gold? By checking family history.

Just ask Genevieve Main. She put her family history expertise to work for the U.S. government for 14 years digging up the genealogy of land. As a mineral rights expert, Genevieve would track down the rightful owners of not only a piece of land but all that hides beneath—including oil. According to law, if your title doesn’t explicitly give you mineral rights, then your ownership doesn’t go beyond the surface; someone else, even a perfect stranger, could own everything below.

So, for land that has been owned for hundreds of years and passed through many hands, it’s quite possible for a modern-day possessor of those mineral rights to not even realize that his or her oil-tanker has come in. It’s a scenario Genevieve knows all too well and one that kept her plenty busy digging into other people’s family histories.

Genevieve would spend eight hours a day scouring through land titles. At night she would “eat a little dinner and then start setting up the lineage,” spreading out all the records on the floor in order to find the missing holes. The worst part? “Working on the cement floors of all those courthouses. Looking through all the books. It was hard work,” says the 82-year-old today.

Genevieve approached her job just like she approached her own family history research: starting with the records she had and going from there. “Sometimes we only had the land patent [or first-title deed], and we had to track it down to the current owner. Sometimes we worked backwards,” she says. Beyond that, Genevieve would branch out into other records, including probate. That’s when the job would really get interesting. “When we couldn’t find the titles, we had to go check the wills—to see where ownership went.”