> Possibly back in the childhood of the universe.
That's 13 billion years. There will have been nothing back then (conversely, one of my pet ideas is that the superdense initial universe was actually fertile ground for large civilizational construction - but all of that would have been over in a few milliseconds as the environment cooled off; that's just by the by).
You would just look at stars in the galactic neighborhood. 1000 LY out or so.