Jonas Bronck
Jonas Jonasson Bronck (* around 1600 in Komstad , Småland , † 1643 ) was the first European settler at the mouth of the Hudson River ( New York ) in 1638 . According to him, the district has Bronx (originally The Bronck's Land ) named. In 1642 a peace treaty was signed between the Dutch authorities and the Lenape Indians who lived there in his homestead in what is now the Bronx, which he called Emaus .
For many decades there were various assumptions about the origin of Bronck.
According to the opinion of many Faroese , which has since been refuted , he was a compatriot who emigrated to America. In the Faroese capital Tórshavn , the street Jónas Broncks gøta is named after him, and there he was not only regarded as the son of the city, but also as “the first New Yorker”. Under the name Johannes Martini Farinsulanus (or: Hans Mortensen [ from the Faroe Islands ]) a theology student was enrolled in Roskilde (Denmark) in 1619 . The Faroese and Danish priest couple Billu and Morten Jespersen Brunck (also: Jespersøn ) from Tórshavn are named as his parents .
Most plausibly, the American genealogist Brian G. Andersson recently disproved the thesis that the Faroese Broncks were the namesake of the Bronx by stating that the settler on the Hudson River appears in an engagement document as Jonas Jonasson . Jonasson cannot be the son of Morten (i.e. Mortensen ). The Faroese Morten Jespersen Brunck died on August 15, 1583, almost seventeen years before the date of birth of Jonas Bronck from the Hudson River.
Today it is certain that Bronck came from his homeland Komstad (today in the municipality of Sävsjö , Småland) via Holland . Various sources mention a Jonas Jonasson Bronck as the first settler in the area of what is now New York, where he is sometimes identified as a Scandinavian, sometimes as a Dutch. This could be explained by the fact that, as stated in some sources, the Swede should first have emigrated to the Netherlands.
literature
- GVC Young: The Founder of the Bronx , The Manx-Svenska Publishing Co., Peel (Isle of Man), 1981 (20 pages. Young was probably the first to point out that Bronck was Swede)
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bronck, Jonas |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Bronck, Jonas Jonasson (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | first European settler at the mouth of the Hudson River (1639) |
| DATE OF BIRTH | around 1600 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Komstad , Sweden |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1643 |