I had a folder with someone's name as part of the title, decided to change to a name that included others, moved emails from the others to that folder--and, when I opened the folder, found all the emails from the original person were missing.

At some point, I looked for the deleted emails that I wanted back in the Deleted folder but never found them. 

Does changing a folder name delete the contents?

What else could I have done wrong?

What should I have done to preserve the original emails?

Is there anything I can do now to recover them?