Jean Guyon

French colonist

Jean Guyon du Buisson (Bapt. September 18, 1592 – May 30, 1663) was the patriarch of one of the earliest families to settle on the North shore of New France's St. Lawrence River. Guyon made his living as a master mason and, according to Perche born genealogist Madame Montagne, was regarded as having an excellent reputation as a mason. In 1615, he helped construct the Saint Aubin de Tourouvre church steeple's interior stone staircase and in 1625 he was charged with the re building of Mortagne's fortifications. Guyon and his family emigrated from Perche province to New France on the North shore of the Saint Lawrence River near present day Quebec city as part of the Percheron immigration movement, a pioneering group of about 300 colonists who settled in Canada in the three decades starting in 1632. Robert Giffard de Moncel was granted by the Company of Hundred Associates the Beauport seigneurie, one of the New France's first seigneuries, Beauport now being a borough of Quebec City. The Beauport seigneurie was to be the first agriculturally based settlement requiring the recruitment of tradesmen such as Guyon to establish the new colony. After his death in 1693, his heirs engaged in a protracted legal dispute over his lands.

Guyon fathered ten children, eight of whom married, and he is known to be an ancestor of many French Canadians. By 2006, news media noted that at least three out of four Québécois descend from him. The descendants are often recognized as Dion, sometimes as Despres, Dumontier, Lemoine, in Louisiana as Derbanne and Texas as Berban. According to Charbonneau et al. 1993, more than 2,150 births of Guyon descendants had by 1730 been recorded, and according to the Université de Montréal's Research Program in Historical Demography (PRDH), Guyon had by the end of the 19th century 9,674 married descendants, and thus ranked second among top New France pioneers in terms of number of married descendants. The PRDH program enabled neurological researchers to trace 40 cases of classical Friedreich's ataxia, a rare inherited disease, across 12 generations of previously thought unrelated French Canadians descendants to one common ancestral couple: Guyon and his wife Mathurine Robin. The disease causes progressive damage to the nervous system resulting in symptoms ranging from gait disturbance and speech problems to heart disease. The finding allows for gene chromosomal localization studies that had previously been judged to be almost impossible in rare autosomal recessive disorders.

In 1984, the 350th anniversary of Guyon's arrival, Quebec City named a park after him and a commemorative plaque to honour Guyon was mounted on the church in Beauport by the Association des Dion d'Amérique inc. In 2006, the city renamed a street after him.