To chas_m - I am satisfied that you diagnosed the problem correctly when I examined two "albums" that should have been one. The real album had 8 tracks. Album 1 in iTunes contained tracks 1-7, and Album 2 in iTunes had track 8. The only difference was that in tracks 1-7 the album artist field was blank, while in track 8 it had the name of the actual artist. As soon as I blanked that out, iTunes recognized it as a single album and it synched perfectly to iPad.
Problem is: in my other "Albums" that should be single albums different tracks really do have different artists. Think of a Sinatra album where Frank is track 1, Nancy is track 2, and some of his friends are tracks 3 etc. If I want this all to register as a single album in iTunes, I have to delete the album artist field. Evidently iTunes uses this as part of its algorithm in deciding what songs make up an album. Maybe I don't understand the purpose of the album artist field.