Connection to My Ancestors

I feel connected to my ancestors. I've always done a little bit of genealogy here and there, but never really felt the closeness., until I prayed about it.

I love doing genealogy. I am a huge history buff, and love old time periods. I love to learn personal things about history and especially my own family. When I started doing genealogy in my early twenties I though it would be so easy since so far, all I found was the unusual names of my closest kin... Huff, Legg, Mullins, etc.. Imagine my horror when I got further in and found such dreaded common last names as Johnson, and Smith! (actually Smyth). But I moved on. Anyway... I've had several brick walls that have been so stubborn that I give up for a while before I come back to it. I would have tiny victories here and there, but some of the lines I ached to find were impenetrable. My brilliant husband said to me one day after I whined about not finding a specific person... "why not pray?"

OK.. so I did. I asked my Father in Heaven to help me find these parents of my great great grandfather Johnson. When I woke that next morning, I went to check my email and had an email from a very distant relative who was also searching for the Johnson line. She had not only names, but dates and birth places for the parents of my gggrandfather! I was thrilled and truly humbled and grateful! After praying my thanks a great feeling of connection to my ancestors came to me. I feeling that I knew they were part of this, and that they want to be found so work could be done for them in the temple. It was awesome!

So genealogy means more to me now than finding these names. I feel them as family.