Bad luck, Jami! I feel for you.

You won't find the savegame file in the VV2 program folder. It should be (assuming you are running Windows)under My Documents > LDW > Virtual Villagers - The Lost Children (assuming the BigFish version; other suppliers will be similar). Is it possible that you were doing some computer 'housekeeping' and accidentally moved the folder/s? You might try searching your hard disk for files with the *.ldw extension. There should also be a file named ldwlog.txt - you could try searching for that, too.