During the summer, the Library and Archives Canada website launched a new website, redesigned for accessibility and easier navigation.
Today, with Canada's Thanksgiving Day on my mind, I retraced my steps to redo my research into hubby's great uncles from the Slatter family tree, all Canadian bandmasters.
Ancestor search
As shown here on the main search page, the choices are "library search" and "ancestor search."
I used "ancestor search" to look for results related to Captain John D. Slatter (1864-1954), the renowned bandmaster of the 48th Highlanders of Toronto.
He served in that post for 50 years and both wrote and arranged lots of military music. Two musical pieces show up as the first of 65 items in the results. Although I know a lot about the good Captain, I'm always interested in discovering new nuggets of family history, like these.
Look at all results
Interestingly, because of the way the search function operates on this website, I found not John D. Slatter, but his oldest son, Albert Matthew Slatter (1887-1970), on page 3 of the results.
Clicking to view the result, I found in the Canada Gazette of November 15, 1919, Albert was mentioned in a long list of changes in military status (promotions, demobs, medically unfit, etc) announced via this paper.
I knew of Albert's military service, because I have his attestation and other documents, but this aspect was a new wrinkle. So I'm happily redoing other searches for the Slatter bandmasters, expecting a few fresh results to turn up!
By the way, my genealogy friend and blogger Linda Stufflebean left a comment that reinforces the idea of redoing research as time goes on: "Today, it always pays to refresh because of all the new records becoming available." So true!
Happy Thanksgiving to my friends up north.
