Family History Work

Dear Family,
So, this week I saw several miracles. The first has to do with family history. The past few months, starting in March I have been working on trying to find parents to Matthew Smith one of our direct ancestors. I thought that I had found the correct parents quite a while ago so, had spent the rest of my time branching off from there. I came to find out a few weeks ago that I had made a mistake at the very beginning of my search. I was pretty upset. I had spent months researching and updating that part of the tree, adding sources, merging copies, and typing out info. So, I gave up for a few weeks. Until I read the First Presidency message for the month. President Monson says "The Lord expects you and me to perform our family history work well. I think the first thing we must do if we are to perform our work well is to have the Spirit of our Heavenly Father with us. When we live as righteously as we know how to live, He will open the way for the fulfillment of the blessings that so earnestly and diligently we seek.
We are going to make mistakes, but none of us can become an expert in family history work without first being a novice. Therefore, we must plunge into this work, and we must prepare for some uphill climbing. This is not an easy task, but the Lord has placed it upon you, and He has placed it upon me.
As you pursue family history work, you are going to find yourself running into roadblocks, and you are going to say to yourself, “There is nothing else I can do.” When you come to that point, get down on your knees and ask the Lord to open the way, and He will open the way for you. I testify that this is true." If this wasn't a little personal prophetic epistle I don't know what would be. So, I tried it out. I got on my knees and asked for some help because I had run into a roadblock. So, the next day I went to work searching again. For a few days I seemed to be just pouring over the same records that I had gotten so familiar with to no avail. Until just a couple of days ago. One day after leaving the library I looked to my left and saw that the man next to me was using ancestry.com for some research of his own. I asked him a few questions about his research gave him a familysearch.org card and then he told us he knew who we were because some of his children were "Mormons" so we asked if we could come and teach him more.. he refused but as we were about to leave I noticed that he had been logged into ancestry under the "Jefferson Parish Library" I found out that the library that we go to every single day has complete access to ancestry unlike the Family History Centers limited access. The next day I logged into the account and found the correct parents. It was pretty exciting! So, I know that one of the principles President Monson was trying to teach us was that when we hit roadblocks in our lives that we just need to KNEEL down and pray and ask for help. There is something powerful about kneeling prayers. So, I know that God does indeed answer prayers and that when we are given a promise by the Prophet that it will certainly happen as long as we do what he says.
Love, Elder Smith