Finding family ancestry

Have you looked at any ancestry message boards?
I found my entire family going back nearly 300 years with names, places of birth and towns and villages where everyone was born,who they married, when and where all through a long shot of going onto Ancestry .com
I was just messing around looking for the roots of my maiden surname when I found a 4 year old message posted by one of my second cousins.
She had found letters in the attic of her great-aunt in a house in the mid-west USA.
They were all written in Ruysn ( eastern Slav) and address from my grandfather.
Letters going back and forth over 50 years.
She had them translated into English and her message was posted in hopes of finding relations to my grandfather.
It was amazing that we found each other with just a few clicks of the computer.
We had a huge family reunion in SE Poland 2 years ago, met over 14 members of the family, some were from Hungary, the US, UK.
Met people who still lived in Poland, one lady was 93 and remembered everything from before WW11.
The problem for so long was when my father came to the US as a child the immigration officer misspelled the name of his village. Very common in the 1920's for them to just write the way they heard and not actually look at the proper spelling.
The way they wrote down the village name was nothing even close to the actual spelling, if I had not looked online I still wouldn't have a clue about my family or met anyone.
My father never bothered during his lifetime to get his documents fixed. It was a Soviet state most of his life and he never would of dreamed I would ever visit his village.
Wish he was living he would of enjoying seeing the place again.
Good luck, worth a try at least.