After some more reading about e2fsck I decided that I needed to use the -b option and point to the one of the backup journal entries on that partition.

Let me digress momentarily here to say that a EXT3 formatted partition is an EXT2 formatted partition with journal functionality added.  What this does for you is that whenever the operating system wirtes to the hard drive it also wirtes to the journal and records every transaction with with the hard drive, so that just n case of a situation similar to this the operating system can repair the file system in that partiton.  In a vague conceptual way, EXT3 is very similar to NTFS in things that is handled for the partition to protect data.

After running e2fsck -b nnnnnnn /dev/sdb7 (I forget the actual value I used now for nnnnnnn).  I could have probably used the 'yes for all' option as I did not know what the values should have been anyway and as it turned out I had to keep clicking "y" anyway.

When that was completed, I had a partition I could mount, inspect, copy and write to.  To my suprise, about 99.9% of all files were right where I left them.  Most of the problem appears to have occurred in the primary journal and some directory structures which did not take long to correct.