[QUOTE=Marienee]
I was one for about three decades.
My father is American mutt but the name is welsh in origin and has god knows what kind of genes floating around; my mother is portuguese from the Azores.
[/QUOTE]
That’s interesting. One of my Portuguese great-great-grandfathers was from the Azores too. Although my mother is convinced that a lot of the “Black Portuguese” from that area are only Portuguese in as much as they speak the language 
[QUOTE=GingerOfTheNorth]
Here’s the family last December. My eyebrows are naturally blonde - those are dyed.
[/QUOTE]
Whoa…you look a lot like my sister, also a redhead (and with blond eyebrows too, no less.) My brother also had red hair (same shade as you and my sister.) The only other person in my dad’s family in our generation that has red hair is a cousin of mine. and he has a much lighter shade of red (so that’s three out of 21 grandkids of my dad’s parents.) My dad had eight siblings, none of whom had/have red hair, and neither grandparent had red hair either. My dad tells me that one of his uncles had red hair, as did his grandfather.
Oddly enough, my dad has black hair, but he beard is a shade of red. I used to have blond hair, and I guess now it’s akin to a light brown/VERY dark blonde, and I too have red facial hair.
Oh, and as far as ancestry goes, my dad’s side of the family is pretty much “American.” The last name if French (possibly French-Canadian, though I don’t think they’d admit itm 
), but they’ve been in America for a long enough of time that odds are it’s just a big ol’ bag of mixed European. My mother, though, is at least 50% English (probably more, since I’m sure her mother had at least some English in her,) so I"m 24% English myself. Though it’s possible that within that English is probably some Scottish.
I’m not a redhead, but a chestnut who gets reddish in the summer. My brother would be sort of a light mahogany, back before it was common for guys to dye their hair he would get people asking why he did it - now they still assume he does, but don’t say anything. Since we both have dark skin, we’re not considered redheads by Spanish standards.
My female cousin on Mom’s side is a “true redhead”. Milk-white skin which burns in the bresence of daylight, gets freckles on her freckles very easily, hair the color of copper wire, grey eyes. There are a lot of redheads both on her father’s family (his sister is a redhead, both him and his brother have black hair) and on her mother’s (several of the daughters of my grandmother’s sister are redheads; one of them has five redheaded kids, normal since her husband is also redheaded). No idea about the ancestry on uncle’s side, since there has been no contact after the divorce and that was over 20 years ago; on Grandma’s side there is Catalan, Italian and Asturian blood - the Asturian means lots of Celt ancestors.
In Catalonia, redheads are nicknamed “Phoenicians” because of an extended belief that if you’re a redhead you have some of the ancient shipfaring merchants in you. No idea how long this nickname has been around, since it’s not the kind of thing one finds in official Parliament records and suchlike 
I’m a natural redhead who doesn’t have a great choice of online pics for demonstration purposes…
oh the glamour!
However, yeah, I have mostly red hair with bits of auburn and blonde in it. My parents were both redheads (Dad now has white hair, Mum’s is dyed strawberry blonde). My siblings both are redheads, although my poor brother is more screaming ginger than his sisters; seriously, his hair is this colour –> :o
Our heritage is a mix of Welsh/Scots/Irish. You’ll find us all huddled under whatever shade is available whenever the sun’s out.
We’re all former towheads that are now dark blonde, but my brothers, when they grow their whiskers, have beautiful multi-colored beards, from strawberry blonde to auburn.
I saw the coolest trio of little kids yesterday. Mom was what looked to be a natural redhead, Dad had jet black hair. All three kids had some form of red hair, from carrot to true deep gorgeous red, and their eyes were dark.
I adore redheads in all their many incarnations. Long may you run.
I just realised recently that semi-reds are infiltrating my family. My daughter may carry genes for red-headedness from her Mum’s side of the family and my sister’s long term boyfriend carries the red-ness in his family.
My hair is very dark brown, but if I spend a lot of time in the sun it turns reddish. My dad is Filipino and has black hair. My mom is all sorts of mixed stuff, including some Irish, and has medium blond hair. One of my cousins on her side has bright red-orange hair.
I am not a natural redhead – my natural haircolor is a somewhat strawberryish dishwater blonde. My dad and brother have beautiful copper red hair, though. My dad’s grandfather also had red hair, but none of his children did. My dad was the first grandson to have the red hair (he did have one older sister and one older female cousin with red hair, though) and so he was named for his grandad. 10 years later, dad’s younger brother was born, also with red hair. Old Grandad James ended up having something like 20 grandkids, 4 of whom were redheads. My brother also got the red hair; as did my brother’s son. My nephew is the only one of this latest generation of grandkids to have the red hair.
I’m actually brown-haired, but I have strands of blond and red in there. More red than blond. You can see it when I’m out in the sun.
My facial hair is much redder. I imagine if I grew a full beard, it would be quite the sshade of reddish brown. As I have always been clean-shaven though, the world will never know.
Whoops. I have no actual redheads in my family. I’m a mixture of german, irish, english, and welsh.
[QUOTE=dangermom]
Man, tremorviolet, if you were wearing a Cal jersey in that picture I would swear you were my old roomie. You aren’t a civil engineer, are you?
[/QUOTE]
Eerily enough, I am a civil engineer. :dubious: Didn’t go to Cal tho’, spent over a decade kickin’ around 'til I finally got my degree here in Austin.
Yeah, the biggest downside to being a redhead (other than the merciless teasing in grade school). I love the sun but it doesn’t love me…
[QUOTE=tremorviolet]
Eerily enough, I am a civil engineer. :dubious: Didn’t go to Cal tho’, spent over a decade kickin’ around 'til I finally got my degree here in Austin.
[/QUOTE]
Wow. Because my old roomie–a civil engineer who did crew and is the only redhead in her family–also lives in Texas (I forget where, but I think it’s Austin). So you have an evil twin somewhere–or she does…
I was born with black hair. At one it was all blonde. It slowly got progressively darker so I always considered myself a brunette. However, my hair bleaches very easily in the sun and lately, it’s been turning red. This explains why I burn and freckle like a redhead. This undercurrent of red did not surprise my mom as about half of the 20-so cousins on her side of the family have red hair. She is composed of a very large mix including Irish, Scottish, English, Welsh, Native American, and African.
[QUOTE=dangermom]
Wow. Because my old roomie–a civil engineer who did crew and is the only redhead in her family–also lives in Texas (I forget where, but I think it’s Austin). So you have an evil twin somewhere–or she does…
[/QUOTE]
Huh, that’s pretty bizarre. Could you give me a first name? I know almost everyone who rows in Austin but she may not be rowing right now. (I can’t think of any other rowing redheads that are also civil engineers, I know other redheads and other civil engineers but not the combo) Hey, if you ever email her and she’s not rowing, tell her to come on down to the Austin Rowing Club. We have a kick-butt competetive program and can always use more rowers…
I’m a natural redhead, somewhat a surprise to my dark-haired, brown-eyed, easily-tanned parents. There have been no redheads on either parent’s side in recent memory. Even more surprising, my brother is a redhead too.
My heritage is primarily English/Scottish, with German and French.
We’re unusual, in that we both have brown eyes. I’m the redder-haired of the two of us, my brother having darker skin, few freckles, and hair darkened by his twenties to brown, with a red beard.
So I’m a brown-eyed redhead, lightly freckled. My hair was never bright orange, but rather a slightly darker copper. My eyebrows and eyelashes are dark brown. Wherever I went as a child, adults praised my haircolor. Kids teased me a bit at school, but not as much as the strongly freckled redheads.
By my thirties, my hair had darkened almost to brown. It took me 15 years after that to realize that I was the only person who thought of me as a redhead, so I began getting my hair highlighted with copper, blending with my darkened hair. Having red hair is a huge part of my identity, a source of pride, and it saddened me to realize I was losing that distinction.
I have a fiery temperament (this can be good and bad), and am a Highly Sensitive Person. My kids are both Highly Sensitive, and one of them has reddish hair, but not true red, and not freckled.
I’ve noticed something about redhead comraderie, but wonder if I’m the only one. When out in public I’m quick to notice other redheads, and always give them a smile, as if we’re sort of a secret society, aware of each other due to our rarity. Have any of you noticed that? At my UU church we have an unusually large percentage of reheads, and we tend to sit in a clump on the same side (don’t know why).
My dermatologist explained allergic sensitivity to me, that many redheads have allergies, skin sensitivity, and thus are called “atopes”. As a group, atopes are more intelligent than non-atopes.
It’s not fun being a redhead in Southern California, where tan is the skewed standard of beauty. I recall Bonnie Raitt making that same observation in an interview many years ago. She is also of Scottish descent, IIRC.
My son is a redhead (shown here with his sister a few years ago). He’s the first redhead in at least three generations, on both sides, of dark-haired relatives. My grandmother had dark auburn hair and a great-great-aunt on my husband’s side had red hair. My side of the family is all British - Irish, English, and Scottish - and my husband’s ancestry is half Italian and the other half English and Eastern European.
My dad, the eldest of six, is a redhead, as are his two sisters. His paternal grandmother was a redhead, though none of her children were.
I’m a redhead, my brother is more strawberry blond. Four of my dad’s brothers and sisters have at least one redheaded child (one of his brother’s has no children). I have two daughters…my oldest had strawberry blond hair, which is trending more toward dirty blond now and my younger daughter is a brunette.
Mostly English-Scot background on the redhead side of the family.
I have a reddish beard, but that’s about it. (I’m a standard Celtic three-tone, according to a thread we had about the carpet matching the drapes a few months ago.)
I would, however, like to agree that there’s a definite scarcity of redheaded women.
Well I’m not, but red hair does run in my dad’s family. My older sister is a true redhead, freckles and all that. She is the only one in our immediate family, my sister and I are both blondes. Neither of her 2 children have red hair though, she was rather disappointed about that. If I end up with a red haired child she will probably come and take him away
Neither of my dad’s parents are redheads but one of his brothers had 3 red haired children.
