A friend of mine asked me what my parents owed on my house. They bought it in 1970, took out a mortgage and then a loan. There was a few thousand left on the loan when they passed.
I have none of their papers, how do I find out how much is owed on it and to whom?Thanks.
Assuming it was a 30-year mortgage (about the longest term offered at the time), and they didn’t take a second mortgage, it should have been paid off by 2001.
The property title should give notice of the encumbrance. I don’t know where you live or how these things are done in your local, but the easiest thing to do if you can’t find any records, might be to contact a title insurance company. I’ve found them very helpful in the past with similar questions. Saves a trip to the county hall of records.
No, the first one may have been paid off. All I know is a loan was taken out, and while my father was still alive, there was maybe 6,000 still owed. But I don’t know to who.
As I check online there is a lein on it with a citifinancial or something like that.
It is fairly common for those papers to be filed at County Courthouse (or similar) by the company that makes the loan/lien (etc). You may have good luck by calling the place where records are kept (usually the County Clerk listed in Local Government part of phonebooks, ime).
There is no guarantee that all the documents are on file, but its a great place to start, I do believe. Sometimes, the most you can get over the phone is a volume/page of document locations, but that will allow you to view and/or copy whatever you need. The indexing is often under both parties’ names, too (bank and owner, so to speak, or Grantee & Grantor as it were). Loans that are paid off should have release-of-lien or similar filed (‘on record’, per se) as well, but often it is not done until someone gripes to company that failed to file it 
Good luck; shouldn’t be too hard unless there was not any filing done (which is a big part of the foreclosure mess, if I understand it right). I used to do ‘deed-research’ for loan companies and title folks, and this is how I usually started getting paperwork/‘proof’ together, fwiw. Kinda sounds like a great thing to do in this case, too (but I am not a lawyer, Realtor, or such blah-blah).
I am a Realtor. Let a title company (some states call them Escrow companies) do the walking. If they can’t find it, don’t worry about it.