If you want to know what's in a particular Dutch name, you can now surf the web at the Meertens Institute Corpus of Family Names in the Netherlands. There you can find and peruse the 314,000 family names of all persons with the Dutch nationality, who lived in the Netherlands in the year 2007. And as a bonus you also get about 100,000 family names registered at the census from 1947.
Besides frequencies and geographic distribution maps, additional information about the meaning, composition and history can be found for many names. The names are hierarchically interconnected on the basis of spelling, meaning and frequency. The information is available in Dutch only, but well...if you're rich, American and your name is like...let's say Vanderbilt, you can still check out where your less fortunate namesakes live in the Netherlands. Worth a try and it doesn't cost you a dime.
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