Can you lose your childhood memories forever?

[Ringleader]

Greetings!

I have a question regarding memory and aging. As you get older, are your childhood memories lost forever? That's to say, if you had at one point in your life known something while young, and then as you grew older you forgot it, does that information still remain on the brain in one form or another? My limited understand is that memory is stored in the brain through neural networking, and that memories form together. So even if you forget something, are those pathways and networks still exist or at the very least traces of them? I figure that you still retain a good deal of it because some folks have traumatic experiences as a child and as they grow older, their memories are repressed unless some specific cue happens to bring them back, so by extension maybe a lot of our memories are repressed for entirely other reasons then trauma. I know when I look at an old picture of myself, I remember a little bit more about my life then than I would otherwise, so it seems to me like I still remember things that happened even when I was really young (though I do understand that our memories are quite fallible with regards to past events).

I asked that even if we simply forget, if our brains store at least traces of our past memories because I figure we may one day in the near future possess the technology to decode the jumbled chemical pathways and unlock them for our contemplation once again.

So in short, does your brain overwrite old memories and all traces of them to make room or to de-clutter your mind?

Thank you!

Ethan