messages on watch suddenly only date back to yesterday

I have an Apple Watch series 8 version 10.4. I have a new iphone 14 at ios 17.4.

This morning, I noticed that, on my Watch, in Messages, I see only 4 messages. They’re from today and yesterday only.

Some recent history: haven’t had the smoothest transition from my old iPhone 8Plus to the 14, including my not realizing I had to go through the same sort of steps to pair it with my new phone as I had w my old phone. The fact that my Watch was showing up on my new phone in the Bluetooth setting display was leading me (and a variety of Apple reps) astray, including a Watch Specialist, making us think it was already paired. At that time I was trying to solve why my Watch wasn’t pinging when I did a Find My in iCloud. It displayed as Location not found.

After giving up on the Watch Specialist, I resorted to unpairing and then re-pairing the Watch, and pinging worked great after that!!!

Yesterday I eagerly turned in my old iPhone to FedEx for trade-in. Not convinced I prepped it right, but onward…

Then this morning I noticed the skimpy messages list on my watch. It may have been like that as long ago as March 21 after I unpaired/paired my Watch but maybe hasn’t noticed it until now, not sure. I just now checked: I can still ping my watch from my new phone and from my PC. So this tells me they’re still “hooked up.”

Could it be taking days for my text messages to come over to my Estch? It did take hours for them to come over (including indexing for searching) to my iPhone.

Is just showing messages for today and yesterday a default Watch setting that took effect after my unpair/repair? I’ll go look for that now while I eagerly await your replies.