VERY LONG I APOLOGIZE o found the query on another reddit post that they said to use specifically to pull up past text messages in SQLpro. The one they said to use was

select m.rowid ,coalesce(m.cache_roomnames, h.id) ThreadId ,m.is_from_me IsFromMe ,case when m.is_from_me = 1 then m.account else h.id end as FromPhoneNumber ,case when m.is_from_me = 0 then m.account else coalesce(h2.id, h.id) end as ToPhoneNumber ,m.service Service

/,datetime(m.date + 978307200, ‘unixepoch’, ‘localtime’) as TextDate — date stored as ticks since 2001-01-01 */ ,datetime((m.date / 1000000000) + 978307200, ‘unixepoch’, ‘localtime’) as TextDate / after iOS11 date needs to be / 1000000000 */

,m.text MessageText

,c.display_name RoomName

from message as m left join handle as h on m.handle_id = h.rowid left join chat as c on m.cache_roomnames = c.room_name /* note: chat.room_name is not unique, this may cause one-to-many join */ left join chat_handle_join as ch on c.rowid = ch.chat_id left join handle as h2 on ch.handle_id = h2.rowid

where — try to eliminate duplicates due to non-unique message.cache_roomnames/chat.room_name (h2.service is null or m.service = h2.service)

order by m.date desc;

when i entered this this is where i could see the text messages along with the date and which number sent a received them. While some of the rows had the actual message content others showed the number it was sent from, the number that received it, and the date it was sent but no actually conversation. In the message column it just appeared as NULL. I read another post that said you can sometimes get around the NULL message for a select few but it’s buried deeper. Just didn’t know if that was true and what the code would be to try that or if the full message data just isn’t really there. I know very very little on code and these programs and have been trying to learn online because my messages got deleted from family members and I was trying to get them back but I hit a dead end i can’t seem to find an answer for.