It seems the pads are highly sensitive to the soldering iron and the fine pitch between pads is also causing problems.  Testing of the new lead wires and the existing pads has shown continuity issues and I need to try again. Either theres too much solder causing shorts or the existing pads tend to lift.  Also the process of desoldering the old headers has caused damage to the board as well.  This is turning out to be a delicate process and one that will take a few tries to get right.  I need to try again over the next few days with possibly smaller wire, lower wattage iron(will require digging one out of the old dust bin) and overall more caution.  Hoping to get to some testing with an arduino soon, but preliminary research has suggested the arduino nano maybe not have enough flash to properly run the display.  My Arduino Uno R3 stopped responding to new programs a few months ago, which is why I've been relying on the nanos, which I have plenty of. I have a few older, custom made Atmega8 boards laying around as well and even a few Atmega32 custom boards I might dust off and see if i can get to work as well. I did make a pong game on an attiny13 last year that might be just the thing i need but it was i2c. Should work right?