Shawn,
Thanks for all the info. It was a great help. I have been able to upgrade from 1.9.4 to 1.9.19 to 2.2.9+ to 2.3.7+ to 2.5+ The info you gave was great. Since my situation was a little different obviously somethings in the process were different. I plan on posting them like you did including how I changed the default latin1 charset in sql to utf-8 for the 2.5+ upgrade.
I only have one problem left - my email still doesn't work. I posted for help in the general forum - https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=229901
Thanks again