My name is Ruediger Gegenheimer and I'm very happy to find
your homepage in the internet. I'm also interested in genealogy
an so maybe I can give you some information about the "gegs".
I'm living in Ittersbach, that's a village in the southwest
of Germany between Karlsruhe and Baden-Baden. I found out, that
round about 100 "Gegenheimer" families living in Germany
(source: the German phonebook), 48 of them in Ittersbach, 10 of
them less then 20 miles from Ittersbach and the others are spread
over Germany.
The legend says, that the Gegenheimer families are originally Hungarian gypsies which came in the 13th to 15th century over
to Germany and settled down in Ittersbach. This theory is supported
if you look at the skin and the hair of the old Gegenheimers in
Itterbach. They are all black haired, black bearded and they have
all dark skin.
Since now I looked only at my family and I know my ancestors
to the beginning of the 18th century. Now I will look at the information
of your web-pages and check if I can link our families together.