Family stories have said that Karl's great great grandfather Christof Zellmer was born in Klawittersdorf, Posen. After extensive searching and many doubts we located the village name on an old map of the area near Deutsch Krone, now known as Walcz. On our trip we visited the area but unfortunately we had left our research map behind in the Netherlands with the boys and could only approximate Klawitterdorf's location on the modern road map. We reached the village of Szwecja, about 5.5 mi NE of Walcz, and thought we had gotten to our Klawittersdorf but were mistaken. Later map comparisons showed Szwecja was formerly called Freudenfier, and was about 2.4 km NNW along the River Pilawa from Klawittersdorf. Klawittersdorf is now an unnamed place with a few houses on the small rather heavily wooded river, and we are very sorry to have missed actually seeing it.

Szwecja is an unremarkable hamlet of perhaps two dozen homes, a store or two and a small church. The town and church were likely the closest place to Klawittersdorf and our Zellmers must have known them well. The principal activities in the neighborhood appear to be farming, timbering, and hunting and fishing the river and lakes in the forest preserve. We suspect Christof's early life included both farming and fishing as his later life did at Wolf River, Wisconsin.