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Early life

Virginia Katherine McMath was born on July 16, 1911, in Independence, Missouri, the only child of Lela Emogene Owens, a newspaper reporter, scriptwriter, and movie producer, and William Eddins McMath, an electrical engineer. Her maternal grandparents were Wilma Saphrona (née Ball) and Walter Winfield Owens. She was of Scottish, Welsh, and English ancestry. Her mother gave birth to Ginger at home, having lost a previous child in a hospital. Her parents separated shortly after she was born. After unsuccessfully trying to reunite with his family, McMath kidnapped his daughter twice, and her mother divorced him soon thereafter. Rogers said that she never saw her natural father again.

In 1915, she was left with her grandparents, who lived in nearby Kansas City, while her mother made a trip to Hollywood in an effort to get an essay she had written made into a film. Lela succeeded and continued to write scripts for Fox Studios.

One of Rogers's young cousins had a hard time pronouncing "Virginia", giving her the nickname "Ginger".

When Rogers was nine years old, her mother married John Logan Rogers. Ginger took the surname Rogers, although she was never legally adopted. They lived in Fort Worth. Her mother became a theater critic for a local newspaper, the Fort Worth Record. She attended, but did not graduate from, Fort Worth's Central High School (later renamed R. L. Paschal High School.)

As a teenager, Rogers thought of becoming a school teacher, but with her mother's interest in Hollywood and the theater, her early exposure to the theater increased. Waiting for her mother in the wings of the Majestic Theatre, she began to sing and dance along with the performers on stage.