My seller had two heirs on the deed and neither one knew the other had already spent their half.

The assumption doing the most work in that initial search was that liens on land attach at the parcel level. They often do, but an undivided interest in a tenancy-in-common can be pledged as collateral and the filing will follow the debtor's personal index, not the property description. Oklahoma, like most states, allows judgment and lien searches by grantor/grantee name and by legal description, and those are two separate searches. Confirm with your title company exactly which indices they run by default, because "title search" does not always mean both.

The cross-county problem you hit is the sharper risk here. If the sister's primary address is in a different county, a lien recorded against her as an individual lands in that county's records, not in the county where the parcel sits. Standard parcel-level searches do not cross county lines automatically. The fix is a named-party search run in every county where each seller has a known address, in addition to the county where the parcel records. With multiple heirs at separate addresses, that search list can get long, but it is cheaper than a dead deal.

The structural lesson from this one is that co-ownership with absentee heirs adds a second layer of counterparty exposure. You are not just underwriting the asset, you are underwriting each seller's personal financial position. A lien on an undivided interest can block the whole transaction because the title cannot transfer clean without it being resolved.

Whether your contract can require sellers to represent and warrant no encumbrances on their interest, or whether you can build in a cure period, is a contract drafting question that needs a licensed real estate attorney in the deal's jurisdiction. Worth the conversation before the next co-heir situation.

One thing I want to understand better: at the point you signed both parties, did your contract require a clean title commitment before the earnest money went hard, or did you go hard on a different trigger?