This does indeed sound in part what I would like to do,
and I will look further into that.

However, I am having additional problems with trying to create
the object from a hash outside of the object.

Let me explain:

In addition to creating the object from the db I also would like
to create it from inputted parameters.  I am used to blessing 
a hash created inside the class, but this time I want to 
create the hash outside the class and pass it to the constructor.
If I do this, then I may not know exactly what the keys are
in the hash and in this way it can be generic.

Does that make a little more sense?  I know this is unusal. Maybe,
I shouldn't be doing it this way at all, but it seems a good
way to deal with a number of other issues I would have to handle 
such as dynamic databases (ie. columns changing in the input forms 
or in the databases).