My Albums Disappeared From Photo Albums

I used to have a huge collection of personally created albums in my Photo Albums tab. They were all listed below iOS 10's native albums. I went into my Photos app (on my iPhone 6, iOS 10.2.1) today to put new photos in an old album that I had recently added to a couple of weeks ago, and that album was no longer there! On top of that, NONE of my personal photo albums were there!

So, I created a new album, and sure enough, it was listed below the iOS 10 albums under the tab My Albums. However, none of my older albums were there.

I haven't updated anything, I've hard reset my device, and I've checked that I have over 2.6 GB of free space on my phone. So, I don't know why my photos albums went away.

There has to be a logical solution, though. So, if anyone has a suggestion other than restoring to backups or resetting the phone to it's original state, then please let me know! I've got thousands of photos, and I'd hate to spend the time sorting them all over again. But I'd rather do that than lose all of the info I've gained in the past few weeks.

Thanks for any help you can offer,

Curtis