Hi, my name is Daniel, I live in Queensland Australia. I created this website to publish information regarding my obscure surname Braksator. My parents immigrated to Australia from Poland in the early 1980s and we are a small family. The surname doesn't sound particularly Polish, and certainly there is more to the story than my family has been able to tell me.
Ever since I was a young child I have speculated on the meaning and origin of my name. I encountered a salesman selling surname-related trinkets. He typed Braksator into his computer and it brought up an interesting history from England in the middle ages, a family crest, and even a family symbol - the dragon. As cool as it to have a dragon and a crest, something didn't seem right about this. We have no family history in England, and I couldn't find anything that would give this credibility. Most likely this computer system would generate a fake entry for unknown surnames to give the salesman something to print out and sell. There is also no such thing as a family crest - this is a common misconception regarding coats of arms and such which bear a surname, but the surname referred to a specific soldier or knight, and not to his family. This guy was a peddler of lies.
In the mid 1990s with the advent of the World Wide Web and Yahoo.com I was able to track down a clan of Braksators in the United States, living in the areas of Maryland and Pennsylvania. They too had a Polish history, and no idea where the surname came from. A theory floated to me by them at the time was that it was a fake name invented by Polish immigrants in (late 19th century?) America - and perhaps they were trying to say "Back door". Just a funny story of course, as I decend from a contemporary contingent of Braksators in the Katowice urban area of southern Poland. My father was specifically from a large family in Sosnowiec. Many of my cousins and other relatives bearing this surname have moved away from the area in more recent times, even to other countries across Europe and the UK, and to other western nations.