I found some electrum wallet backups on a usb stick I found,I loaded them into electrum and it asks for the password
Password was set up by you in the past and its role is to protect your wallet file. You and others can only access private keys in that wallet file if you have the wallet password.
I just want to see a balance
You can only see it if you successfully access that wallet file by your password or if you have its public address to check it on
Bitcoin block explorers or import it to have a Watch-only wallet. It seems you don't have anything of such.
if there is anything worth while in them then I can worry about finding my old password,I used the same password but with different numbers at the end so it is do-able but I don't want to start this process unless I know there is some btc in there.
Can I do this,see the balance of the backup somehow,I don't know the seed or the wallet number but can figure out the password if there something there,I know with unknown btc wallet backup's you load them into qt and can see the wallet number and balance but I can't seem to figure out how to do this with the electrum backup.
Only one option, brute force your wallet password but chance to succeed depends on complexity of your password and how many key characters you remember as well as computational power of your computer used for brute-forcing process.
Are you passwords in the green?. If your password is in the green, chance to brute-force it is silm.