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Van
The prefix van simply means "from", just like the German von. There is a difference in social meaning though. The German infix is strongly associated with nobility, while the Dutch van is far more neutral in this respect. In Dutch it simply indicates the place where somebody came from, whether one is from noble descent or not. There are two quite distinct categories of van-names. The first referring to local landmarks, like the name Van den Burg (from the stronghold) or Van den Berg (from the mountain) and the second category referring to names of villages and cities, like Van Gorkom (from Gorinchem) and Van Keulen (from Cologne). Most likely these van-names came in use as a reference to the place of birth, as even nowadays we wish to know where someone was born, always mentioning the place of birth in passports for instance.
How do you tell the difference between the two categories as mentioned, in case you don't speak Dutch? A good indication is the presence of de, der, den. het or 't after van. It all means "the" and usually refers to something in the first category, like from the hill or from the lake. When there is no "the", you can be rather sure that the name is a reference to a village or city. Prince Willem van Oranje for instance is named after the city of Orange in the south of France. The ancestor of Vincent van Gogh probably came from the German village Goch, as the absence of de or something similar indicates that "Gogh" must be a community. There are exceptions of course. Another famous painter is Rembrandt van Rijn. Rijn is Dutch for Rhine (ij is closely related to i and y in Dutch, being pronounced as one sound, a bit like "y" in "why"), so it seems to mean that his ancestor was born near, at or even on the river Rhine, which is a rather curious reference. The American habit to skip all blanks in the name can be confusing too. Vandeventer for instance is not a contraction of Van de Venter, but comes from Van Deventer, therefore meaning "from Deventer", a city in the east of the Netherlands. Another way of course to find out the meaning of a van-name is to look it up in a dictionary or atlas, ignoring the van-part. An important, but totally different exception to the van-rules is the Vietnamese family name Van, which is not an infix.
Maybe it looks like the capital V in van is used at random here. This is not the case however. In Dutch spelling it is a rule to use a capital V when you skip the first name or initials. Therefore it is Vincent van Gogh and V. van Gogh with a little v and Mr Van Gogh with a capital V. Since we are discussing Dutch names here, it seems appropriate to apply Dutch spelling to the names wherever possible.
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Gorinchem is still there. It lies 30 kilometres east of Rotterdam at the river Merwede, which is one of several streams that form the last stretch of the river Rhine. The distance to Utrecht is approximately 30 kilometres to the north. Amsterdam is 70 kilometres to the north. Gorinchem has a population of some 35.000 people. Officially it is a city as it received stadsrechten, i.e. city rights, in 1382. In Holland city rights have always been the official discrimination between cities at the one hand and villages at the other hand. Amsterdam, Utrecht, Delft and Leiden are other examples of communities that received city rights. On the contrary, The Hague, nowadays residence of the Dutch government and Queen, never received the rights, making it unclear what word to use instead of city.