Ipad Restore & mac.com issue

This issue revolves around my wife's Ipad Mini and the fact that it would not recognize the passcode she had been using for a very long time. Long story short, but after trying multiple different steps we were completely locked out and I read online that I had to restore it using a computer.

I did the restoration on my windows PC and all appeared to go well until after restoration I got a message "Ipad Locked to Owner". This led to an attempt to log in to my wife's apple icloud account. Now that log-in is asking me to verify her email address. When I enter her apple email (a mac.com) it appears to let me log in then I get another screen asking me to verify the email. I enter the mac.com email address and I get "an uknown error has occurred" with no other information as to what I need to do next.

Any suggestions?

This is driving me batty. All because the Ipad wouldn't accept her passcode. Any suggestions?