Thank you karmakeddon. Is it safe to just take the private keys and import them during an install of Electrum? Or do I designate the recovered wallet.dat file as the wallet for Electrum to use? The wallet is very old and I read the format changed so I am unsure if this is a concern. When I mined I used to use the Bitcoin Core wallet.
First of all, backup all the files you found for your safety.
Electrum can't open yor wallet.dat file since it's probably a Bitcoin Core wallet. The best approach would be to download Bitcoin Core, let it sync (should take a while) and open the wallet.dat with it.
For your list of private keys, download Electrum and import your list of private keys.
Would importing the private keys into a new wallet some how destroy or invalidate the coins since the addresses are different?
No. You can just import them.