Missing all photos prior to a certain date from iCloud and all devices

I have been crying for two days now because all my photos from my devices and the cloud that are prior to august 2011 have just disappeared (these included baby pictures of my son and his first three years)!!! I have called and no one can explain to me how this could have happened. Both me and my husband are missing photos prior to 8/15/2011 and we have different accounts but we share the cloud, not the albums. So he has around 20K photos and I have 57K photos on my device and backed up on the cloud. On both of our devices and cloud, the first picture is the same and is from 2011. It's like everything prior to that date got deleted for both of us and from the cloud.

We have upgraded phones many times and I used to be very careful back in the day with iTunes to make sure all my stuff gets transferred but the last few upgrades I just did from the old phone to the new phone at activation and my husband did the same. We got no error messages so I don't think this is the issue. We definitely did not manually go in and delete thousands of pictures so WHY ARE THEY MISSING from the cloud? I am so desperate. I can recover about 50 pics that I posted on Facebook but I am missing years of my firstborn's photos!!! Why do I pay for a service that does not work. Why does Apple not care and make no effort to help or recover? Have any of you in similar situations been able to recover anything from the cloud? The rep told me only 30 days are saved. There is nothing else that can be recovered. I don't believe that!

PLEASE HELP!