Contacts on iPhone 6 will not merge with Cloud I recently purchased and iPhone 6 and sync'd my data appropriately.  However, all of my contacts were apparently still associated with my old work email.  I have since moved on to another job and had to delete that email address - and with it - there went all my contacts.  Through the current contacts app, I only have anything I have added after I deleted that work email address.  I even tried resetting it from a previous backup from my computer, not iCloud.

HOWEVER, when I go to text and type in a letter, all my old contacts show up as options with their correct names, etc.  So clearly this information is on the phone.

Is there a way to get the contacts that are somewhere deep in the phone where the messaging software is accessing it, and then merge it to iCloud?  

I've already tried turning iCloud on and off and remerging.  Unfortunately, it didn't work.
The contacts can be cached on the phone hence why they show up if you search for them, although they are not going to be retrievable. The easiest way to get the contacts back will be importing the v-card files into iCloud.com/contacts under the settings, there is an import button.

Did you have the email account synced to any applications that are on a computer? For example in a mail application or outlook application, digging through them might allow you to pull the card files up. 

Another alternative is to go through the cache on the phone, and start typing them into the contacts application on a computer / iCloud, but thats a pain staking way to do things.

One theoretical way to get the contact files out of the unit would be to use a backup extractor, that can look at the database files of the cache, and pull the contacts out, you would have to do some searching to locate an application like this, although there should be some on the market (http://supercrazyawesome.com)