This is a topic that becomes increasingly awkward the more one investigates it.
Virtually all the information we possess about the Dwarf-rings contradicts some other information we possess about the Dwarf-rings. Keeping this in the context of the story, I suppose this is attributable to the secretive nature of the Dwarves.
In spite of what is said…
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…so that others did not know for certain where it was bestowed.
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…this secret was pretty obvious and apparently not all that well kept.
Michael Martinez in his essay “Them Dwarves, Them Dwarves, Part II” said that it was by no means certain that all seven Dwarf-rings were given to kings, and Tolkien never explicitly said that in his capacity as author. However, the implication is thick in the air…Seven Rings and Seven Houses with Seven Kings. Who else would have gotten the rings except for the kings? As alatar noted above, Gandalf believed that the Dwarf-rings had gone to the kings. Of course, it could be argued that Gandalf would not be as knowledgeable about dwarf matters as he would be about, say, elves. However, Thrain, who would probably be expected to know, was positive that his ring was the last, and everybody we ever come across holds the same opinion.
So, taking this as a starting point, anybody who knew about the Rings would probably have a pretty good idea who had them. The mystery, as far as the Longbeards are concerned, didn’t start until they abandoned Khazad-dum and then was aggravated when Thror went batty and ran off and nobody except Thrain knew that Thror had given him the ring.
All this indicates one of two things, either after the rings were lost the dwarves didn’t have a problem telling outsiders about their loss or that knowledge about who had the rings was pretty common among people in the know about such things.
The next oddity is the way in which the fates of the various rings are divided up. Three return to Sauron and four are destroyed. Durin’s Ring is one of the ones that returned to Sauron. Which two the others must be is not too difficult to guess. According to my personal view, almost by default these have to be the rings that belonged to the Firebeards and Broadbeams. We know very little of these peoples after the end of the First Age. The Firebeards were probably permanently broken and there were probably very few of them left in subsequent ages. The Broadbeams did not suffer a catastrophic population loss in battle, but they must have lost a large portion of their homes in the destruction of Beleriand and depending on how the destruction happened they may have lost a lot of people in this event. There is some talk about the Broadbeams going to Khazad-dum…but then what? Nothing more is said of them. They may have merged with the Longbeards or simply lived with them as a separate people. If they merged we don’t have seven houses anymore and then things get really messy. I personally, upon no evidence whatsoever, tend to the idea that what few Firebeards survived never left the Blue Mountains and they never recovered their power in a meaningful way. Since the Broadbeams are mentioned as having gone to Khazad-dum, I have to accept that. However, again based upon no particular evidence, I think they probably went back to the Blue Mountains before too long. I think their population must have dropped at the end of the First Age…or if you prefer, not many of them went back to the Blue Mountains. On the other hand, there is also no reason to suppose that they went back to the Blue Mountains, assuming a hypothesis that they left Khazad-dum. They could have gone anywhere. But the fact remains that we never hear of them again. I personally think they did go to the Blue Mountains because the Blue Mountains were safe.
This gets us into difficulties because there were never any dragons in the area of the Blue Mountains. This leads to a division of the three western Houses had their rings repossessed and the four eastern houses had their rings eaten…which seems a little arbitrary. However, if a dragon had gone to the Blue Mountains and eaten a dwarf-king I think we would know about it because the dragon would probably have remained in the area and caused all the usual problems in the neighborhood. Orc raids, on the other hand, could have come down from the far north into the Blue Mountains and not have been known to any of our chroniclers or at least not have excited any attention until after it was known that a king had been killed and a ring taken.
(Please don’t mention that it is quite likely that a bunch of the dwarves probably lived south of the Gulf of Lune).
This leaves wondering why the eastern dwarf rings were eaten by dragons. For that, we have that reliable old standby of an explanation, “we don’t know what went on in eastern middle earth.” For those among you who exhibited excellent taste in reading my third arcane topic, you know that I think the eastern dwarves fell into evil of a kind, but were not necessarily subjugated to Sauron. Sauron might at some point have used dragons to try to bring the more independent minded in line. I personally think that the dragons were largely free actors outside of Sauron’s direct control and that they went rampaging about eating what they wanted. On the whole, I suspect the dragons ate the rings not realizing what they were, and not necessarily noticing that they’d eaten a ring at all.