A Ginger... Or A Redhead?

The internet is full of fights, as I'm sure you've all seen from your days browsing the interweb.  Whether it be a childish cat fight between girls on Facebook or people calling each other words so foul I feel uncomfortable reading them, the animosity of the internet encourages people to speak anything on their mind, whether that is a good thing or not. However conflicting the internet can be, it is also a source of unending knowledge if you know how to use it and which sites to trust. That is why I was utterly astounded when I couldn't find where the term ginger came from. I found three that were highly popular, but still no one can definitively prove that any are correct.
The first is rather self explanatory. Many believe that the term is derived from the root ginger. It's not very common in everyday cooking, but what really bugs me is the color. Ginger roots are a sandy or tan color, which does not match up very well with the reddish orange tinted hair we call gingers now. The only explanation is that many ginger flavored snacks, such as Ginger Snaps, have a red tint to them.
Another popular theory comes from the popular sixties sitcoms Gilligan's Island. One of the two main girls sported red hair and freckled skin. Her name, of course, was Ginger. This one seems the most likely to me, as it has a direct relation between the name ginger and redheads.
Others believe that the term ginger came much earlier than the sixties to the nineteenth century when England occupied Malaysia. In Malaysia there is a plant whose fire red flower would but my hair color to shame. It is possible that ginger is an English term from the 1800s but I think it seems less likely than the Gilligan's Island theory.
While the internet may not be able to come to a conclusion regarding where exactly the term ginger originated from, there is a widely accepted definition. A ginger is a person who has red hair, pale skin, and freckles. Pretty straight forward and simple enough. What I was more surprised to see was the difference between gingers and redheads that most people point out. Here I have been using them synonymously, when I could have checked the internet real quick to find out how wrong I am. There is only a slight difference, but one that the people of the internet find important to point out. Redheads have red hair like a ginger, obviously, but normally do not have skin quite as pale or as many freckles. The difference is quite obvious if you simply google the words. If you search ginger, pictures will pop of nerdy boys with bright orange hair and freckles covering every inch of their face. The word redhead on the other hand, yields much more attractive women a darker red hair (many of which look horribly fake by the way) with still pale skin but almost no freckles. It makes sense if you think of the roots of the words. Redhead is merely stating the color of someone's hair, such as brunette or blonde. Ginger is a slang word, and like most slang words were invented to tease and ridicule. We know that the term has been used with negative connotations since the beginning, even if we don't know when the beginning was or why it began. Now I guess it time for all of my fellow people with red hair out there to decide. Are you a ginger... Or a redhead?