hello all:

i welcome your help/input here -

within the last few days our family received an unsolicited offer from an oil and gas exploration company, stating that we owned certain acreage in nacogdoches county (to my understanding, consisting of a portion of the j.a. chireno grant, about 18 miles east from the city of nacogdoches), and offering to lease our "non-participating royalty interest" for three years, for $3400 per acre, with our family to retain a 1/5th royalty.
frankly, we were barely aware that we possessed this property interest and, in any event, are entirely unsophisticated in this arena.
so as we were trying to figure out what to do with this offer, meaning how to respond, i happened upon your internet site which seems to indicate that a well hit within the last week or so in or about this immediate area, and that the preliminary data looked promising.
so i assume this explains why the oil and gas exploration company contacted us and, more notably, why they seem quite eager to make a deal here.

so i barely know what questions to ask - e.g.:

how do we confirm whether the well that hit is within versus merely near our property interest?
in either event, what do we do/should we expect from here?
what if anything do we need to do to protect our "non-participating royalty interest"?
how should we respond to the outstanding offer (guessing we reject it if the well is within our property interest, but what if the well is merely near the property interest)?
and finally, assuming that the well that hit is actually within our property interest, how do we evaluate the worth of our "non-participating royalty interest"?

on behalf of my family, i sincerely appreciate any assistance any of you can provide here.

thanks.