Legal Question in Wills and Trusts in Texas

Re: Costs to clean up very old intestate Texas estate

This is an expensive prospect. You have not mentioned who has been paying the taxes, who runs the farm, who has been collecting any profits, etc, all things which will impact your course of action.

The first thing to do is to attempt to locate all of the current owners. This may involve geneaology research, locating probate files and affidavits of heirship at various courthouses throughout the country, and title searches. You may be able to do a lot of this before hiring a lawyer, or at least do a lot of the legwork yourself, with the advice of a lawyer.

You establish heirship in several different ways, depending upon the circumstances. If one of the heirs died with a will, but it was never probated, then you may need to probate it. For anyone who died without a will, you will need to prepare affidavits of heirship.

Once you figure out as many living owners as you can, you then contact them and ask them to give or sell your mother their interest in the property. She accumulates as much ownership as possible this way. She will not be able to recoup her costs for this part of the process, unless any of the heirs agree to pay.

Once you have gone as far as you can go, if she hasn't been able to acquire 100% ownership, then she will need to file a lawsuit, either for partition or a petition for forced sale. This is expensive - at least $5,000.00, maybe 5 times that, depending on circumstances. She may be able to get the other heirs to pay their portion in the end, but it's not certain. In any event, there may well be some owners who are unknown or unable to be found, and they will not be chipping in. Plus, your mother will have to pay another lawyer to represent those unknown or unfindable owners.

In the end of such a lawsuit, your mother may receive a fraction of the farm, while the other owners receive a different portion, or she may be able to buy the other owners out.

When the costs are more than the value of the land, which often is the case, there is no good solution. Either the farm is important enough for your mother to spend lots of money to get it, or it's not. If it is not worth it, or she just can't afford it, the most cost effective thing to do may be to stop paying the property taxes, and let the county take the property and sell it in a tax sale. Your mother may or may not be allowed to buy it in the tax sale. Whoever does buy it in that event would get a clear title.

I have been involved in a partition lawsuit much like this, where title was passed through intestate succession through at least 4 generations. The actual lawsuit took a little less than a year, and cost thousands of dollars.

The whole process may or may not have been cost effective. The tract was big enough so that it may have been. However, the family attachment to the land, the wish to pass it on to future generations with a clear title, and the client's ability to come up with the cash necessary made it happen.