@Katmo here!

First, tell us your name and age.
Hi all! I'm Katrina, and I'm 34. I'm happily married to the love of my life and have been since I was 22. We have a toddler who exhausts everyone around him regularly.

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I'm a doctoral candidate preparing to defend my PhD in African History this June (I hope!) I teach both African and Ancient history at the university level, and find marking maddening.
That said, I LOVE my research and get super passionate about unpicking stolen identities in history. My work is to use scarification as a way to help identify enslaved individuals recorded in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It's pretty amazing stuff and it's a wonderful feeling to help give histories back.
I'm passionate about learning, kindness and compassion.. but I admit I find emotional vampires tedious and annoying, and don't really handhold.
I have two cats now, as our eldest adored ragdoll was put down on April 22nd with chronic kidney failure to our heartbreak.
I'm an artist in my spare time (aktarin.deviantart.com) and play all manner of RP type games. Ranging from playtesting for WoTC to GW2 etc.. though the toddler and my upcoming defense (and getting a job argh) means my time is HUGELY limited now.

Hello Katrina :D You have me really curious. How do you use scarification to identify enslaved individuals? I'd assume they are treated like fingerprints, but how do you even see the scars or were their scars recorded as well? I can't imagine many were taking selfies lol.

Great question!
Luckily, due to how 'exotic' scarification often seemed to missionaries/travellers/colonial officials, there are some truly intriguing resources hidden away. not only are there these great drawings by the above sorts who often attempted to say 'such-and-such scar' belonged to such and such village/ethnic group, but you also have this incredible resource I'm working with called the Liberated Africans Register. From 1808-1863, the British Royal Navy intercepted slave ships heading to the Americas, and offloaded the human cargo in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
In the 1808-1819 registers specifically, which are held in Freetown even now, the clerks actually DREW marks on the people they saw. So we have about 16,000 entries with details like "Scarified along both shoulders, burn mark on chest, tattooed across forehead." sometimes with the marks drawn, sometimes detailed like "Three marks down each cheek"
It's not always an easy match, but so far I've been able to track down a few of them.

So this image is my visualization of a specific pattern with a digital cropped image of the line it's drawn from in the 1814-1815 register:
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While this one is from a 1924 colonial book written by an officer in the then Gold Coast (now Ghana) which meticulously records which scar belongs where:
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Wow! that's a really interesting line of work. Goodluck with your candidacy, glad you found something you enjoy doing :P

Many thanks!!
I love my work.. just hate the marking part of the job.
/eyes the stack of exams