Then we are back to my original proposal. That for some reason she felt that even in the face of reality she needed a husband for "Official Records", unless her husband were still actually alive. Of course, as you know there are also psychological reasons for being in denial about a loved ones death, the holding out hope against hope.
Is there a possibility that the person buried in Green Lawn cemetery at Camp Morton has been misidentified? I have no real idea how good prison records were kept, or how much care they would use to determine the identity of the prisoner.
I had something simular happen in my personal research of my 2nd Ggrandfather when I found two persons with the same odd name and surname, who were in fact related, but lived in different parts of the state and enlisted in different units. Both were captured in Richmond in April '65. I was only able to seperate the two and find out which was my true Ggrandfather by their height on their prison releases and my mother's statement that as she remember when her grandfather died in 1919, when she was only 6, that he was a tall man and had physical deformities due to his service in the war. One was 5'7", the other was 6'3" quite abnormally tall for men of the mid 1800's, and was wounded severely at Gettysburg, and by artillery at the Wilderness.
What even complicated the matter even farther was that the incorrect man had enlisted in the same unit where I found my mother's paternal grandfather. My mothers Ggrandfathers did not meet until well after the war, but my early research was that they had met during the War while serving in the same company. So for several years I had identified the wrong person as one of my maternal Ggrandfathers.