This year of 2025 the theme of study for my church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is church history/the Pearl of Great Price/the Doctrine and Covenants. We get to focus on the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ in these latter-days through the prophet Joseph Smith. Here is the 2025 manual for our study.

I was thinking last Sunday about how grateful I am for Joseph Smith’s courage in praying to God, asking if he was forgiven of his sins, and what church to join. That act led to the appearance of God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ to Joseph, in the spring of 1820. It also led to the restoration of Christ’s gospel to the earth!

On the day before Christmas Eve, what some call the day of Christmas Adam (because Adam came before Eve), we held our Joseph Smith Birthday Party. I’ve done this for a few years now such that it has become a family tradition. Joseph was born on December 23, 1805. To celebrate his New England heritage, we had clam chowder, made by my son-in-law. Joseph’s mother sold root beer and gingerbread so we had homemade root beer (also made by my son-in-law) and gingerbread ice cream. Specifically the ginger bell rock ice cream from the BYU Creamery. (Normally I would make it but somedays I just sacrifice having high fructose corn syrup in my food and buy it, to save time. I just had a tablespoon, as it was not low-carb.)

So Joseph was on my mind as well as Christ, the week of Christmas, as we celebrated both their birthdays, two days apart. As a family we talked about Joseph’s testimony during our birthday party dinner. My 20 year old son said that he was convinced of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon Another Testament of Jesus Christ partly because of Joseph Smith’s example with his sealing his testimony in his blood. He would not have given his life for a lie, as my son said in our discussion.

Here is a wonderful video by my husband’s cousin, Lynne Hilton Wilson, sharing the background of Joseph Smith. She is very knowledgeable! She has a PhD in religion. Plus, she’s a mother so that means more in my book, because she is full of mother wisdom.

Anyway, she talks about members of Joseph Smith’s family tree as well as what was going in Vermont when he was born, and New York when he was a young man and living there. This is all so fascinating! I agree with Lynne that I want

So many early Americans in the New England states were hungering for religious freedom. Quakers, Jews, Calvinists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Anglicans, Dutch Reformed, Catholics, and more. With this milieu of faith, what were the religious overtones at the time? Cousin Lynne uses the acronym TULIP to explain what many of these people believed. See below.

I am so fascinated by all of this because so many of my ancestors came from this early American religious environment. Same with my husband. (His grandmother’s grandfather, Jesse Nathaniel Smith, was a first cousin to Joseph Smith but that’s another post for another day.)

At my church, I play the piano for the children’s singing. Last Sunday, when church services were over, and I was about to leave the room, one of the other adults there reached out to me. She said that she had just found out that we are cousins! She had been to BYU’s Relative Finder website and saw that we are third cousins once removed, descended from Abraham Daniel Washburn. That spurred an interest in me to come home and learn more about him. I remembered his name, but the only thing I knew about him when she mentioned his name was that I’m descended from him through my father. So, I looked him up in FamilySearch.org and discovered that he lived in the Hudson River Valley of New York! So cool!

A few years ago, I read aloud a picture book to my son about the Hudson River Valley for Morning Basket time. I became fascinated by this place. It just sounds so lovely and picturesque. I had no idea my fourth great grandfather lived there! He was a Quaker, born in 1805 in the Hudson River Valley. He heard the gospel preached by Parley P. Pratt, a missionary who knew Joseph Smith, in 1836 and joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with his wife Tamar. He said that this restored gospel was like a light in the darkness for him.

Yes! The restored gospel of Jesus Christ continues to be a light in the darkness for his descendants, including me. I’m so grateful to know that the atonement of Christ is available to all. It is not limited, like these early religious Americans believed. See the “L” in the TULIP a few pictures above. Joseph Smith’s ancestors were among the people who started to see that the beliefs summarized by the TULIP acronym were incorrect, including Solomon Mack, Joseph’s maternal grandfather. Watch the video to learn all about this.

Here is another great video for your Come, Follow Christ study this week by one of another of my favorite presenters, Jared Halverson. Happy studying! Learning of this early religious environment and Joseph’s background really helps me see just how marvelous the revelations of Joseph Smith were.