Hello John and list. John, I don't know of anything academic written about those lost BDM records, but my GUESS is that this will be covered in the home-page to the free online NSW BDM indexes. (no time to look there myself). Here is the link to that home-page: http://www.bdm.nsw.gov.au/ Regarding the lost NSW State Records material, such as a lot of convict documents, this was written about very recently by Christine YEATES at NSW State Records. It will almost certainly be on their web-site somewhere. Again I don't have time to hunt for it, but here is the URL to their home-page: http://www.records.nsw.gov.au/ HTH: ray ----- Original Message ----- From: <john.mail@ozemail.com.au> ... Perhaps they had a budget cut the year Thunderbolt was born and decided only > to register two out of every five births at Wilberforce. > I'm particularly interested in just how gaps in records came about. > Or in any published studies on such. > For convict records there's been a few studies, apparently, of how > records > came to get lost, or wilfully destroyed. > But what happened to those studies? Perhaps they got lost too? > I suspect it is all very complicated ... if only we knew. > Cheers, > John