Are you at a brick wall in your genealogy, searching for the background for an elusive ancestor? You just know that if you could only discover this ancestor’s origins, it would open up a whole new world of family history for you to explore. But, you seem to have been through every available record source, and you’ve still found nothing. This ancestor looks like he or she just appeared out of nothing, with no parents or background, or anything. Even DNA testing hasn’t shown up any close matches to anyone on that particular family line. What do you do? Do you just give up and accept that you will never know anything more about that family line? No. What you do is conduct a neighborhood study.