Br. Gelisaire

John Baptiste Guyot was born in 1811 in Paris and entered the Novitiate there at age seventeen in 1928. That same year he took the habit of the Brothers and received the religious name of Brother Gelisaire. He taught in France for ten years before being sent to Canada. In 1849, Bishop Kenrick of St. Louis, Missouri, requested Brothers for a school in St. Louis. Brother Facile, the Superior General, chose Brother Gelisaire to be the Director and he left Montreal and traveled to St. Louis to open Christian Brothers College. In 1852 he was sent with three companions to open Our Lady of the Gulf School in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. In the Summer of 1853 he was called to New York and on his way he was stricken with yellow fever and was removed from the train at Montgomery, Alabama, where he died at age forty-two, having been a De La Salle Christian Brother for twenty-five years.