I'm not a "true" ginger per-say, but I have a light red tint to my blonde hair and blue eyes. Out of my kids, my son is lighter with the blonde red hair and blue eyes while my daughter took after the Italian in her biological fathers side so she's olive skinned and brown hair with blue green eyes. Genetics are weird... cool, but weird.
Tell me about it. A colleague of mine has brown hair, as does her husband. Both their children were born as gingers, but are beginning to turn brunette (they're 17 and 20).
She has an uncle and a grandpa who were both gingers until they were in their mid twenties - then they turned brunette.
My whole family (and me) was like that. Born ginger turned brunette, well, more of the strawberry blond hue. But beards stayed intact. Red as rust. I don't know about my girl cousins (did their carpet stay red unlike curtains). What's that. Half mutation? Freckles all over face, and now not a single one. But I blush wherever I had freckles, the exact same pattern. I have high percentage of gingers in my neighborhood. At least 13% , but this is Thracian neighborhood (Aristotle and other gingers). And we tend to marry strawberry redheads, which have mutated from arianic blondes when they were 7 years old. My mother is Turkic but was blonde like Hitler jungen, even eyebrows, till 9 or 10. So called Plavtsi (Turkic blondes) ??!
She has an uncle and a grandpa who were both gingers until they were in their mid twenties - then they turned brunette.