Have thumbnails, iPhoto lost many original files!

This is the second time iPhoto has killed me, this time loosing some very valuable photos! I am using iPhoto 9.5 on Mavericks. I recently discovered lost pictures in an event from 6 months ago. It has the thumbnails so it looks fine on the surface but when I click on a picture and tried to look full screen at the photo (when it loads the original) I got a black triangle exclamation point error. This happens for all but 3 photos (out of about 200 original). I looked at a few other events in the same time frame and found another one missing about half of it's pictures. Haven't gone through the whole database to find out what else might be lost at this point. I looked in timemachine but it only goes back to November when I upgraded to Mavericks. It shows info that I have older dates but I can't access them, I guess Mavericks doesn't like Snow Leopard.
I then made a copy of my iPhoto library "just in case" so that if my next steps are disastrous I might have hope. I tried Command-Option starting iPhoto and tried Repair permissions, repair database and rebuild database. I didn't try rebuild thumbnails since I'm worried iPhoto will get rid of any thumbnails it can't find an original file connect to which means I'll lose even the thumbs.
Two questions:
Where does iPhoto save thumbnails? Any sort of order that means anything to humans? Is this going to be even remotely easy to sort so that I can have even a low-res copy of my pictures for memories??
Do I have any other options to try to fix iPhoto? It did this about a year ago as well (with an earlier version of iPhoto which prompted an upgrade) so I am rapidly losing faith in this program for something as important to me as photographs.
Thanks

1 - since you have a copy of your iPhoto library you are safe
2 - rebuilding thumbnails is safe - expecially since you have a backup
3 - by your thumbnails (and by default your priginals and your previews are stored in the iPhoto library in standard finder folders - you do not access them that way but they are there
4 - download iPhoto Library Manager - http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/ - and use its rebuild to create a totally new library leaving the existing one unchanged if you need it for the future
LN

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Have thumbnails, iPhoto lost many original files!

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