A population which develops as a linear birth process from one individual gives rise to a family tree of size N which shows the relationships of the N members to each other. If this tree is given, but with no a priori information of which point is the root (the original member) we seek to utilize our knowledge of the stochastic manner in which the tree grew to estimate this root. A maximum likelihood estimate is obtained, and the probabilities that this estimate is the true kth point, or a member of the true rth generation are obtained as functions of N. As N → ∞ these probabilities converge to non-zero values for any fixed k, r, which are surprisingly large—for example, when k is 1, the limiting value is 1 — loge2 ≈ .30685.