I seen many advertisements for serial LCD's and presume these are just
    ordinary parallel LCD's with a dedicated microcontroller like a PIC to
    turn it into a serial device.  Do anybody know where I can get hold of a
    datasheet on one of these serial LCD devices?  Better yet....  is there
    perhaps someone out there that has implemented such a serial LCD driver
    in C and is willing to make that source code available to me?

I believe that there was a full description, including code, for Scott
Edwards' "serial backpack LCD display" (one of the first such devices)
published in Nuts&Volts.  Try their web page.  (I don't think it was
written in C, though!)

BillW