Jonas Bronck

Jonas Bronck (alternatively, Jonas Jonsson Brunk, Jonas Jonasson Bronk, Jonas Jonassen Bronck) (died 1643) was an immigrant to the Dutch colony of New Netherland after whom the Bronx River, and by extension, the county and New York City borough of the Bronx are named. A mural at the Bronx County Courthouse depicting Bronck's arrival was created in the early 1930s by James Monroe Hewlett.

Different theories account for Bronck's origin.

The town of Tórshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands, has a street bearing the name Jónas Broncksgøta ("Jonas Bronck's Street"). One theory holds that Jonas Jonsson Bronck was born ca. 1600, son of a Lutheran minister, Morten Jespersen Bronck, and was raised in Tórshavn. The fact that Jonas Bronck's middle name would in this case be Mortensen, not Jonsson, speaks against this theory. The Faroe 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 and Norway, as well as 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 identify Bronck as 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 as a Dane. A 1908 publication portrays Bronck as 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".

...
Wikipedia