Problem:
Mother in law passed away and they gave me her iPad, it's I think 2nd gen so about 8 years old now.
Worked just fine but I could never install apps as I could not sign in to iCloud etc. 
They had written down the user name and password but that never seemed to work. 
I think someone changed this for her at some point and never updated the info in her little book where she wrote these things down. 
 
It has worked fine for 3 years but then the other day wanted this elusive log in to open. I clicked on message that said "someone has tried to access this device with the find my phone app and it has been locked" . 
That's a total mystery as who would that be other than me and I'm not the registered user. 
 
Anyhow. The recover process comes to a dead end with two glaring facts..
First sending an e mail -  on the welcome screen it  shows what was one of her e mails but with a lot of dots so not totally clear..
 
I have the password and log on for her Gmail that but--- that ended up with needing a verification which was either send a email to her long dead Shaw email account or a text message to her phone...arrgg. Father in law still has that number but he's an old guy and made them give him a flip phone with no texting option. 
There seems no other options to recover the user name or password.. Is this thing a paper weight now?? 

Why not just reset the iPad?
 
Bill

Take it to an apple store

Wayfarer
Why not just reset the iPad?
 
Bill

Well what I find looking on different web sites is this is not easily done. One site say's even the FBI cannot hack into an ipad... But I really don't care is I wipe it because there is nothing on it other than a few few apps like the guitar tuner. 
 
This site seems to have some promising ways to do it so I just might take a chance and try Part 4 with the downloaded app for recovery. 
https://www.apeaksoft.com/ios-recovery-mode/reset-ipad-without-apple-id.html
 
These things can be a little sketchy so I'll use an old laptop I don't care about. 
 
Why I posted here is believe it or not I trust some people here to know a safe way to do this ..

gswitz
Take it to an apple store

This would be my last resort// have you ever been in an Apple store? It's sort of like a lot of dudes with their noses in the air because they actually believe Apple is better...And the device has a street value of $30... I'm sure they would be charging a lot more than that to fix it. I just hate to toss things out ,,, 

So sorry for your loss.
You just need to do a "restore" from iTunes Recovery Mode.
The goal being to erase the contents of the iPad and starting fresh. This process will remove all of the contents and settings and you will have an iPad in an unactivated state.
From there you can set it up as a new iPad with an iCloud account of your own.
 
hope that gives you an idea to start with.

Thanks I'm just fighting my way through this.
 
It took about 4 trys as my iTunes is under my account so it didn't like the ipad. 
It's downloading an update for the ipad right now and I think this might work. 
 
It will be cool as I would like to use it to display lyrics using one of the apps you can buy. 
 
It seems weird that you can do this as it would imply you can steal someones iPad and make it your own... I thought the whole purpose of the find my phone app was to lock out any thieves. 
 

My first generation iPad has an option in "Settings" to "Reset all Settings" and "Erase all Content" and "Reset Network Settings".

Well I left it going overnight and this morning it has finally updated it self to the latest OS.
What I have learned is you need to bring iTunes up to date first before you try this. Otherwise it stalls half way through the restore process. Then the ipad itself needs to be up to date. Once those 2 ducks are in a row it restores. 
 
it is now sloooowly going though a bunch of re boots and installing firmware etc. Funny the serial number in iTunes now say's N/A. 
But I think this is workin

That didn't work--- it still wanted the id and password.
 
But I did get it going which  was a long process.   
I knew my mother in laws email address so that was the Apple ID.
Dozens of password attempts failed. 
I had made back ups of her documents for her years ago,,, guess what I found, a password document which allowed me to open her old Gmail account. This still wanted verification but I somehow got in there after 20 minutes of guessing. 
There sure enough were emails from Apple warning me that someone was messing with the ipad
I also found one from last march when I first attempted this and even though the reset password had expired it let my follow through and re set the password,,, then I had to re set the security questions and on and on,,, after at least an hour I now have the ipad working again.