Confirm & document an MRCA

Once you've identified the common ancestor behind a match or a cluster, GDAT 4 lets you record it on the match and write it up as a family-group narrative — turning analysis into documented, reusable research.

Record an MRCA on one match

Open the match in Person and go to the MRCA tab.
Type an MRCA note describing the common ancestor.
Set the Family group. The tab lists the ancestral couples in this match's tree as clickable buttons — click one to use it as the group name.
Click Save.

Confirm matches into a family group in bulk

To work through a whole group at once, use Research → Confirm Ancestors:

Select a family group in the left list.
Pick a member in the grid; type or review its MRCA note.
Click Confirm → assign to this family group (or Mark as MRCA (status only) to flag it without assigning a group).

The Research workspace — family groups, with the Narrative and Confirm Ancestors tabs.

Write the narrative

Research → Narrative gives each family group a research write-up:

Select the family group.
Write in the narrative box, or click Insert lines of ascent and Insert timeline to pull structured facts from the tree data automatically.
Save reusable boilerplate with Save as template, and drop it into other groups with Insert template.
Click Save narrative, and Export… to save a copy outside GDAT.

Narratives are plain text. The GDAT 4 narrative editor stores plain text (which is also valid Markdown) rather than rich text — simpler to search, diff, and export.

Confirming feeds the analyses. Assigning matches to family groups sharpens MRCA, Segments, and Group Compare — the more you confirm, the more those screens can show.