What John Toppa is Working On

Posterity Land & Title is John Toppa's company. It is an active Florida limited liability company that provides title services and independent landman operations, and John manages it out of Melbourne while traveling to Fort Worth, Texas each month. The work is unglamorous and it suits him.

A petroleum landman traces who owns what beneath the ground, reading deeds and mineral conveyances back through decades of county records until the chain of title is clear. John runs basic mineral title, and he built a second practice on top of it that draws directly on his legal training. That practice is lease review.

An oil and gas lease is a contract with obligations on both sides, and operators do not always meet them. John goes back through old leases, checks the terms against what the operator actually did, and identifies where a lease may have been breached. Where there is a breach, there is often an opportunity, and the opportunity is what he and the team he works with go and pursue.

It has worked. A block of leases the team acquired closed in August 2025. John has since hired and trained an analyst for his Florida office, and he continues to work alongside the man who first taught him the trade.

A group of families in Brevard County is building a classical Catholic high school. John Toppa sits on the CORE team, and the job he took is the one nobody volunteers for. He is heading up the location search. That means finding a building the school can actually grow into, understanding what it will cost, what it will need, and whether the site can carry a hundred students and then two hundred.

It is title work of a different kind, and it happens to be exactly what he is good at.

The school is named Mary, Star of the Sea, and it is set to open in the fall of 2027. Its model is the classical Chesterton curriculum, taught in the Catholic tradition, and John's interest in it is not abstract. He was formed by Catholic schools in this county, at Ascension Catholic School and then at Melbourne Central Catholic. He wants that formation available to the next set of families here, including his own.

John collects antique books. The collection is small and he is honest about that, but it holds a volume printed in 1668, which is to say a book that was already old when the county he lives in was named. He finds them the slow way, in used bookstores and on the back pages of dealer sites, and he bought a cabinet for the new house to keep them in.

The books lead to the second half of this. He visits places where the faith he practices was lived and recorded, and he has done it across the United States, through Italy, and most recently in Lisbon, Portugal, on pilgrimage in March 2026. Rome came before that. Ireland and France are next, once the baby arrives.

Both interests run on the same instinct that pays his bills. Go back to the original record, read it carefully, and find out what is actually there.