Ken,
Last message was last Friday. I said I'd work through it on the weekend. Just now finished, today. Quite a lot of issues to solve, but your support showed the way and made it possible. So thank you very much.
Two problems took the time.
1) First, getting the installed Moodle version to accept the updates from git required a host of additional git commands. These included 'stash,' 'merge,' 'commit,' 'stash pop,' 'pull,' 'revlog,' 'HEAD,' and so on.
A good resource I found for this is as follows: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/index.html I know there are many other command references available, but this one is aptly named magic, because it focuses on achieving astounding results.
By the way, I will follow your advice and download git for my desktop to practice, and to forge a link between my desktop and my moodle install.
2) Second, you correctly surmised that with my root at httpdocs, my moodle site is on a shared virtual server without access to the root, basically rendering chown commands inoperable. However, this did not prevent doing the git upgrade, EXCEPT when it completed I would get $CFG errors related to the location of the moodledata folder which had to be writable and not in a publicly accessible location. You can see on moodle.org the 100s of folks who have dealt with this issue. And I became one.
Fortunately, our ISP, http://unionwebservers.com went the extra mile and was able to establish permissions for us that overcame this issue, without endangering other server users.
As a result, I now can run git from a command line and get my updates. So now I've got it all! Thanks again.
Rod