Congratulations! I recently had a similar breakthrough with one of my ancestors. My ggg grandpa, Ezekiel Thompson was in the 146th Indiana. After the war he married Sarah M Skelton but years of searching turned up nothing on her. She and her sister showed up in the 1870 census living with a different Skelton family and that is the earliest I could find her. After 15 years a friend figured it out...Sarah's mother died before the war and her dad, also in an Indiana regiment, died at Nashville during the war and is buried in the National Cemetery there, so the family she was living with was her aunt and uncle. The Skelton researches working on this same family had no idea who Sarah was and who her parents were. Mystery solved, and another Civil War ancestor I didn't know about!