Your records may have been:
If an organisation cannot provide you copies of your records, they need to tell you. Under the Privacy Act you have the right to know why.
Learn about the common reasons why you might receive less information than you expected.
If the organisation cannot provide records about you, it might be helpful to look for historical information about the place where you were in the guardianship or care of others.
These could include newspaper articles, photographs, books and audio histories.
For example, you could try looking on the Archives New Zealandopen_in_new websiteopen_in_new or the National Libraryopen_in_new website.
You could also try requesting records that other organisations might have about you.
For example, if the organisation that made decisions about where you lived and who you lived with no longer exists, your records might be somewhere else.
Or, more than one organisation may have been responsible for decisions made about you, so you may be able to get different records from more than one organisation.
You can get support to help you figure out which other organisations might have records about you. We have some suggestions about where you might find support.
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When you ask for your records you may be told that there are no records to send to you.
This may be because the records were:
Here destroyed means:
Redact means hiding / taking out some information in a document.
This could be because there is information about other people in your records.
This is often done with a thick black line.
Click here to learn more about redactions
You should be given the records you asked for unless there is a good reason not to.
If an organisation cannot give you a copy of your records they need to tell you why.
There are some reasons an organisation may not give you information you have asked for.
These reasons are set out in the Privacy Act.
The Privacy Act tells organisations how information must be:
Click here for more reasons why an organisation may not give you the information you have asked for