Why are my pictures coming up as empty grey boxes in iPhoto?  But only some of them . . . .

This is a bit of a long story, but here goes . . .
We have iPhoto 8.1.2 on an iMac that has OS X 10.6.8
Awhile back, after shutting down my computer normally, it wouldn't start up again.  So my husband did a restore and fixed it.  We had everything backed up through the Time Machine and everything seemed happy. 
But a few days later I tried accessing some pictures and it turns out the last 6 months of our pictures aren't showing up on iPhoto.  When you quickly scroll through the pictures, you can see the thumbnails, but when it stops scrolling, they turn into grey boxes.  When you try to open a picture it shows a big exclamation mark.  You can see the location where the picture was taken though. 
Anyways, when we look through the backups on the Time Machine they all have the same problem.  We looked in the Originals file, and those dates don't even show up with any files at all.  For some reason, any older Time Machine back ups were deleted to make room for new ones.
Have I lost all those pictures???  I can't find them anywhere to fix it.  I know a week before we restored the computer all those pictures were there and working fine. 
Please help. 

When you empty the trash the files therein are not erased* but instead the space the occupy is made available for re-use. So until that space is overwritten the files may be recovered with an app like File Salvage
Regards
TD
* the exception is with Secure Delete. Then the file is actually overwritten and effectively unrecoverable.

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