I've had people full on state as fact children can't recall anything before age [4-7]. 10? Wow haha.
My earliest memory is at around 18mo. When I was nearly a father myself, I told my mom of my early memory and she remembered it too and told me how old I was.
My kids, especially the first, would routinely recall things when she was 3 that happened when she was 2 or slightly younger. I can recall thinking, "I barely remember that, how the heck do you remember that!?" However, she had forgotten most of those early early memories a few years later.
> 18mo
I wonder if it's something to do with the memory being reinforced (maybe in surprising ways). E.g one of the memories I have from around a similar time is me receiving a toy gift (video memory) . It makes for a decent display item and has been kept out in one bedroom or the other in every house my family lived in since. So I would have seen it every now and then throughout my childhood. Perhaps, this reinforcement can occur in other, more non-obvious ways in a child's brain, offering a similar explanation for your experience.
It's surely true that a memory fragment can be kept alive or reinforced by stories or physical tokens (objects, photographs). This can be true of a high-fidelity "correct" memory as well as of a sketchy incorrect one!
It's also well-established that "memories" can be purposefully created by the application of the same tools.