There was the aircraft lost from Brazil to France about a decade or so ago that was found in the Central Atlantic with contemporaneous (historical?) data,
You're talking about Air France 447 lost June 1, 2009. A fairly specific location for the loss was known and yet it took almost two years to find the wreckage.
"The Brazilian Navy removed the first major wreckage and two bodies from the sea within five days of the accident, but the initial investigation by France's Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses pour la Sécurité de l'Aviation Civile (BEA) was hampered because the aircraft's flight recorders were not recovered from the ocean floor until May 2011, nearly two years later."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447as well as the Malaysian aircraft (yet to be found).
MH370. No known general location. Extensive searches have been unsuccessful.
An aircraft lost about 1998 was found off of Newfoundland via underwater LIDAR techniques within a year after it was lost.
I'm not familiar with that one. I presume the general location was known.
The infamous Swamp Ghost is perhaps a better example of a wreck found long ago by searching for it via historical records and anecdotal reports.
Nope. I'm very familiar with that one. B-I7E 41-2446 was initially discovered by accident in 1972 by the crew of an RAAF CH-47 Chinook on a routine mission.
What about the Greenland wreck that was attempted to be rehabilitated and to be flown out only to have it burn upon take-off?
The B-29 "Kee Bird" was a well known wreck long before Darrel Greenameyer launched his ill-advised recovery project. Nobody tracked it down based on historical records.
I presume from your question is more towards historical wrecks rather than NTSB-related (or more recent losses).
Even in the case of more recent losses, unless a specific location is known, searches are unsuccessful. The best example is probably Steve Fossett whose light aircraft disappeared September 3, 2007. The general location was known but extensive searches were unsuccessful. "In September 2008, a hiker found Fossett's identification cards in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California, leading shortly after to the discovery of the plane's wreckage." Another example of found-by-accident.
This past summer, the Air & Sea Heritage Foundation hired Ballard's E/V Nautilus to search for the wreckage of the Sikorsky S-42B Samoan Clipper that went down off American Samoa in 1938. An analysis of historical records suggested a fairly specific area, but two weeks of searching found nothing.
The discovery of Antoine de St. Exupery's P-38 is an interesting case. A diver came across the wreck in the late 1980s and thought it was a German aircraft, but was not able to identify it and gave up. Then in 1998, a French fisherman pulled up a silver bracelet belonging to St. Expuery which revived the diver's investigation which ultimately resulted in th identification of the wreck as St. Exupery's aircraft..
https://www.argunners.com/discovery-of-antoine-de-saint-exuperys-p-38-lightning-the-story-behind-it/I'm still not aware of anyone successfully doing what we're trying to do.