Mellette County Transfer on Death Deed (Mineral Interest - Individual Grantor) Form

Mineral rights in South Dakota often sit far from their owners: an undivided fraction of the oil, gas, and other minerals reserved decades ago from a family ranch, held today by someone living in another county or another state. This fillable transfer on death deed names who receives a South Dakota mineral interest at the owner's death, is signed and recorded while the owner lives, and transfers nothing until death. The form recites exactly one individual owner as transferor, with one signature line and one acknowledgment certificate.

A beneficiary deed for severed mineral rights

South Dakota adopted the Uniform Real Property Transfer on Death Act in 2014, at SDCL 29A-6-401 to 29A-6-435. The instrument the act creates, called a transfer on death deed and searched for as a TOD deed or beneficiary deed, is nontestamentary: it passes the described interest outside the will and outside probate. The act reaches an interest in real property located in the state, and South Dakota law treats a severed mineral interest, created by grant or by reservation, as exactly that kind of interest. The deed form recites the land by legal description, then describes the mineral interest in its own section, the undivided fraction and the substances it covers, in the words of the instrument that created it.

Recorded now, effective only at death

Under SDCL 29A-6-408 the deed must be recorded before the transferor's death with the register of deeds of the county where the property is located; a signed deed left unrecorded at death transfers nothing. Until then it changes nothing: the owner keeps every right to lease, sell, mortgage, or develop the minerals, the designated beneficiary holds no interest of any kind, and the deed can be revoked at any time by a recorded instrument (SDCL 29A-6-405 to 29A-6-414). Two recording-counter details are built into the form. A transfer on death deed is exempt from South Dakota's certificate of real estate value under SDCL 7-9-7(5), and the deed face carries the transfer fee exemption statement, SDCL 43-4-22(18), that county register of deeds intake practice requires of an exempt deed.

One transferor, named beneficiaries, and the survival election

The form recites exactly one owner as transferor, with a marital status line following the optional statutory form at SDCL 29A-6-430, and carries a single signature line and one acknowledgment certificate. The beneficiary section names one or more primary designated beneficiaries with mailing addresses; unless the deed states otherwise, two or more take in equal shares, as tenants in common. A contingent beneficiary section covers the pattern where no primary beneficiary survives, and a separate election states whether the transfer is subject to the one hundred twenty hour survival requirement. A reserved mineral fraction passing to children in equal shares, and an out-of-state owner naming a single relative, are the patterns this single-transferor configuration recites.

Dormant minerals stay on the clock

South Dakota's abandoned mineral interests chapter, SDCL 43-30A, deems a mineral interest abandoned after twenty-three years of nonuse, with title vesting in the surface owner, unless a statement of claim is recorded in time. A transfer on death deed does not state a claim under that chapter, and a statement of claim under SDCL 43-30A-4 is prepared and recorded separately and is not included in this package. The guide describes the chapter alongside the deed, so both clocks are visible in one place.

The download contains the blank deed as a fillable PDF formatted to South Dakota recording standards, with the three inch first-page recording space and the preparer and return-address blocks the statutes require placed in the left half of that space; a completed example showing a Harding County mineral interest fact pattern from start to finish; and a plain language guide that walks through every numbered section, the notarization, and the recording steps. The materials are informational and are not legal advice.