Currently if a married couple share a record with the husband or wife as the primary and the other spouse as a relationship record, even though they both give, if the primary passes away the entire record is marked deceased, at least if you use Target Analytics to do it. This seems non intuitive to me. Once the primary passes I am left with no option but to create a new record for the surviving spouse if they wish to continue to give. And they have no historical giving even though they have been giving through their spouse possibly for years. I believe it should be simple enough to program it where either one of the people on the record could be marked as primary. Then if one spouse dies and they are the primary, you could make the surviving spouse the primary and mark the deceased as such. Otherwise I would potentially have to double the size of my database in order to create a record for each member. Not good.
We don't use TA but RE will create new record for the surviving spouse. Select it as the option in configuration.