My mother and her mother and aunts all use the word gibbons for spring onions ,I wonder if this is perculiar to the Kear family or if it occurs in others?

Hi We always used gibbons in Newbridge Mon. but most of the families there came from the FOD including both sides of my family ALLAWAys and POWELLs

Thanks Sylvia mine too were from the forest and ended up at Aberbeeg,Mon

you know I think this is a Welsh thing rather than a Forest thing - Jibbons / Gibbons for spring onions -
however give the ebb and flow of families between the Vallies coal fields and the Forest, this could become a chicken and egg debate :-)

I would lend support to the welsh connection, I am from the FOD and my wife is from Wales, and it was her family that introduced me to the term jibbons. My family always called them spring onions.

I also found this minor reference on wikipedia under scallion (which is the term I have to use now in order to find them in the market in the US :-) )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scallion

My Forest grandad who had Monmouthshire connections used to say jibbons, and given the forest accent it could easily have been gibbons, but I was more used to the term scallions. I just presumed (rightly or wrongly) that this was a Yorkshire version as my mother was from Yorkshire and they all use scallions or "scally onions" up there. They were still marked up and sold as Scallions on Guisborough market when I was there last June. Enough diversion for me tonight, back to some family history.

Hi A Welsh-speaking person on the Monmouthshire message board has written to say that it comes from a WElsh word"sibwm" and that jibbons is a "Wenglish" word, Wenglish being the language spoken in parts of Monmouthshire. This was mostly the Western coal-mining valleys(including Newbridge, Mon where I was born)
Sylvia