The founding claims
The Priesthood Restoration Dates
The founding event of the Church’s authority went unmentioned, by anyone, for five years.
The point in one sentence
The angelic ordinations by John the Baptist and by Peter, James, and John are the foundation of the Church's entire claim to exclusive authority, and no surviving account of either event, from Joseph Smith or anyone else, appears until five to six years after it supposedly happened.
What the record shows
The documentary timeline
The claim is not that nothing was written in 1829. It is that the people writing did not mention this.
Sources: Joseph Smith Papers, Priesthood Restoration; BYU Studies, Priesthood Restoration Documents
Read the primary documents yourself: Joseph Smith Papers and BYU Studies. Both are Church-owned.
Concede this first
Absence of evidence is not proof of absence. Record-keeping in 1829 was thin generally, and FAIR argues from circumstantial evidence in the Doctrine and Covenants that the Melchizedek ordination fits inside a specific 17-day window. Read FAIR's full treatment. Do not claim "no record exists." The argument is about dating and silence, not total absence.
Why the silence is still a problem
This is not a minor event that might slip someone's mind. It is two separate visits from resurrected beings physically conferring the only valid authority on earth. Yet Joseph's own 1832 history, written in his own hand, describing his own call, does not mention either visit. The men who supposedly experienced it did not preach it during the years the Church was being organized and its authority was being challenged, which is exactly when it would have been most useful.
And when the accounts do appear in 1834 and 1835, they arrive alongside a reorganization of priesthood offices, and earlier revelations were revised to include priesthood language they had not contained. That pattern, the story becoming more detailed and more supernatural as time passes, is the same pattern documented on the First Vision page.
Why this should make you question
Authority is the Church's central claim. Every ordinance, every temple, every claim to be the only true church runs through those two ordinations. If the founding events of that authority were not described by anyone until years later, while the theology they support was still being assembled, the most natural reading is that the story grew with the institution. The believing reading requires the two most important events of the Restoration to have been quietly set aside by everyone involved for half a decade.