Jonas Bronck (alternatively Jonas Jonsson Brunk, Jonas Jonasson Bronk, or Jonas Jonassen Bronck) was born around year 1600 and died in 1643. Bronck 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. Origin 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. 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 Iceland, Greenland, Denmark and Norway.) 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". In 1981 the Manx-Svenska Publishing Co. released a now out-of-print 19-page pamphlet, The Founder of the Bronx, authored G.V.C. Young O.B.E., after he had conducted research in the Netherlands, Sweden, and New York. Young reported that he examined crucial references: Bronck's betrothal certificate dated June 18, 1638, and Bronck's document of guarantee from April 30, 1639. The theory of Bronck's Swedish origin fundamentally rely on Young's interpretations of three key words found in these Dutch-language documents and that Jonas Bronck's relative Pieter Bronck was born in 1616 in