Dutch Americans
While the Netherlands was a small country, the Dutch Empire was quite large so emigrants leaving the mother country had a wide variety of choices. New Amsterdam was not high on their list, especially because of the Native American risk. The major Dutch cities were centers of high culture, but they still sent immigrants. Most new arrivals were farmers from remote villages who, on arrival, in America scattered into widely separated villages with little contact with one another. Even inside a settlement, different Dutch groups had minimal interaction. With very few new arrivals, the result was an increasingly traditional system cut off from the forces for change. The people maintained their popular culture, revolving around their language and their Calvinist religion. The Dutch brought along their own folklore, most famously "Sinterklaas" (the foundation of the modern day Santa Claus) and created their own as in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". They maintained their distinctive clothing, and food preferences and introduced some new foods to America, including beets, endive, spinach, parsley, and cookies.
Dutch name
The most common Dutch surnames in the Netherlands (as of 1947) and Flanders in Belgium are listed to the right. Meertens' Dutch surname database lists 94143 different family names; the total Dutch speaking population in Europe is estimated to be about 23 million people. The most common Dutch names in Belgium are nearly all patronymic ""father-based"" names in which they are composed with the following formula "name of father + "-son"," the only exceptions being ""De Smet"" (the Smith) and - to a certain extent, because it is also a patronymic ("Thomas") - ""Maes"" (Meuse). The most common Dutch names in the Netherlands are more diverse, with names ranging from ""Visser"" (fisherman) to ""Van Dijk"" ((living along) the dike) and ""De Jong"" (the young (one)). It should be remembered however that these figures are based on the data of an entire country, and on a smaller scale other names tend to dominate certain regions.