As soon as you find out, let me know, David.

I'm in a similar situation with a good customer who has a client wanting to know who owns the mineral rights to a small parcel in Washington County, PA.  "All we want to know is who owns the mineral rights. We do not need them searched." was the information passed along to me.

The problem is that the county does not keep track of ownership of subsurface estates since they are not separately assessed.  I tried to explain that there is no way to determine that without examining the deeds in the backchain to find the original severance, (which can be as far back as 1850 in this part of PA), then running it forward from there.  My customer understands this, but had a hard time explaining that to his client.

So I quote them a price, they come back and tell us all they want is a document retrieval.  I run the index on the current owner and pull copies of all leases, easements, etc. for the usual fee plus copy fees.  I also included a disclaimer stating that I did not do a search

Next day, my customer forwards an email from his client, says basically, this is not what we wanted, we need to know who owns the mineral rights, the deed clearly states it is not the [surface owner]. (It doesn't "clearly state" anything of the kind.) 

My customer wanted to know what he should tell them,  I simply replied, "Tell them that if they believe the surface owner does not own the mineral estate, they need to be willing to pay someone to find out who does. They need to understand that mineral searches are not cheap.  They also need to specify if they also want know who owns the oil & gas.  That's considered a separate estate from the mineral in PA."

So now I'm waiting to hear back from my customer to see how his client responds.  Sorry this isn't very helpful, David, but if nothing else, it just goes to show that Frank Zappa was right when he said that there's more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe.

Regards,
Scott Perry