Jonas Bronck - Origin

Origin

There are different theories as to Bronck's origin.

In Tórshavn in the Faroe Islands there is a street bearing the name Jónas Broncksgøta. One theory holds that Jonas Bronck was born ca. 1600, son of a Lutheran minister, Morten Jespersen Bronck, and was raised in Tórshavn. The family may have originated from the Norwegian district of Elverum. (At the time, the Faroe Islands were part of a political entity also comprising Denmark & Norway, and Greenland.) In 1619 the younger Bronck went to school in Roskilde, Denmark, and eventually made his way to Holland.

A number of sources published in the early 20th century state that Bronck was Danish, an idea espoused by A.J.F. van Laer, archivist at the New York State Library. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for History, also parenthetically claims Bronck to be a Dane. A 1908 publication states that Bronck was a Mennonite who fled the Netherlands to Denmark because of religious persecution. In a 1977 pamphlet commemorating the founding of the borough a publication of the Bronx County Bar Association states that it "is widely accepted that Bronck came from Denmark, but claims have also been made by the Frisian Islands on the North Sea coast and by a small town in Germany."

In 1981, after conducting research in the Netherlands, Sweden, and New York, G.V.C. Young O.B.E. published the 19-page manuscript The Founder of the Bronx. It states that Bronck was born circa 1600 in Komstad in Småland, a historic province of Sweden adjacent to the then-Danish province of Skåneland, made his way to the coast on the Baltic Sea where he became a sailor in the Danish merchant marines, and later transferred to the Dutch fleet. The theory that Bronck was a Swede has been adopted by the official historian of the Bronx, Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx Historical Society and other publications.