"That's like charging Holocaust victims to confirm their relatives were in fact gassed," says Fatimah Jackson, a genetics-trained anthropologist at the University of Maryland. "There are certain things you don't charge people for. We're talking about American slavery, forced migration, prisoners of war. I don't think you ask the descendant community to pay to find out something that's their God-given right."

Kittles' service is part of a technological trend fueling the American obsession with genealogy, as people increasingly find kinship through computers. His plan has special resonance in that it deals with a population whose past was intentionally obliterated. And it has provoked anger, in part because it grew out of a well-respected project to study the dawn of the African-American experience.

Kittles worked two years on the African Burial Ground Project, an effort to reconstruct the lives of 408 early African-Americans whose remains were unearthed in 1991 from an 18th century graveyard in New York. Led by Michael Blakey, a professor of anthropology at Howard, a historically black university in Washington, D.C., the project has been fleshing out the bones with stories. Anthropologists linked some of the caskets to ancient African rituals. Forensic specialists translated the rough etching of bones into tales of hunger and harsh labor.

But it was the recovery of DNA from the remains that provided the most tantalizing clues to the origins of the skeletons. Blakey's team began gathering DNA samples from living Africans, and found matches in the DNA of some 300-year-old skeletons.

It dawned on Blakey and his colleagues that DNA technology held the prospect of something even bigger. Someday, they believed, their genetic database could serve as a Rosetta stone for living African-Americans. Using the tools of molecular biology, the scientists theorized, a black woman living in an Upper West Side apartment could learn from her DNA about a hunter-gatherer ancestor in the highlands of Ghana. Or a plantation-owning ancestor from Surrey, England. Or both.

More than that, the burial project -- whose completion will require $5.9 million in promised but undelivered federal funds -- could help deflate racism in America by laying bare the extent of our interbreeding. It could underline a fact that has yet to seep into the national consciousness: DNA analysis has largely refuted the concept of race as a biological category.

However, many scientists felt it was premature to offer a DNA-linking service. For one thing, there are major gaps in scientific collections of DNA from the West and West Central African regions where most slaves were captured, and from the Native American tribes interwoven into the African-American tapestry. Second, Blakey and others believe, DNA evidence could offer only a fraction of the information a person would need to trace his or her origins.

"It's not like you can go into the lab, put in a sample and out pops the village you came from," Jackson says. "Origins are a very deep and very sensitive issue that has to be approached with care and caution and a high level of sophistication."

Kittles, who quit the burial project last year, denies he is rushing things and insists he is painstakingly filling out the database. But he hopes by early next year to begin offering DNA analyses that could point to the origins of any African-American who brings a blood sample to his lab.

Genealogist Dee Woodtor, author of the 1999 book "Finding a Place Called Home," said she expected that DNA analysis could help her clients reconstruct bits of their history, such as the African wars that may have led to the enslavement of ancestors.

Others have more modest goals. Melvin Collier, a Memphis civil engineer, believes that knowing a country of origin would enhance a sense of belonging during the trip to Africa he plans for 2002.

William T. Chapman, a Bonita, Calif., neurologist, came to genealogy out of a sense of loss after his mother's 1991 death. Playing around on the Internet, he found family roots in 19th century Virginia. He wants to push back further, though he's well aware that the connection is tenuous given the vast cultural gap that separates him from Africa.

"I know that if I go to, say, Cameroon, I'm not going to have anything in common with those people," Chapman says. "I don't think I'm going to have a spiritual event. I don't know -- I'm just curious."