In 1918, she joined the Royal Flying Corps in Toronto and by 1920, she had returned to Nova Scotia as a paramedic with the Red Cross Caravan.

[5] She began to travel around Nova Scotia, collecting songs, tales and customs of Gaelic, English, German, Mi'kmaq, African and Acadian origin.

Frequently, she had to walk or sail to remote regions to satisfy her interest, all the while pushing a metre-long melodeon in a wheelbarrow.

Historian Ian MacKay argues that Creighton was a product of her class and social upbringing and that her folk collections were incorporated and co-opted as part of a broader movement that contributed to the commodification of "Scottishness" in Nova Scotian tourism literature in the late 1930s and later that defied class and historical realities.

[8] McKay further suggests that Creighton's work was used by the provincial government of Angus L. Macdonald (and by later governments and influential writers) to create a myth of "hardy fisherfolk" and "Nova Scotia rustics" that actually demean, commidify, and mythologize the realities of working-class lived experience in Nova Scotia.