In the Tick of Time

Oh my God, my wife's turned into a nerd!
Yes folks, it's true. She's got the family tree bug again - this time finding more ancestors on her maternal side. Last time we looked at the Quaintance family. This took us to register offices, county records offices and churches in Devon. Out of it we got back two hundred or so years, contacted lots of long-lost relatives, and finally took over a whole village for a weekend for a Quaintance family reunion. It seems like hundreds of us crowded into a village hall and a family tree was displayed which went round three walls of the hall.
This time, however, the wife is older, wiser and much less inclined to travel. She is researching the Renouf side of her maternal ancestry, originating in Jersey, CI. So internet searching is the order of the day. I find her on the computer at any time of the day or night. Sometimes all I get from her is "Let me show you what I've found about Renouf on the net . . . "
So tonight was one of those nights. She got a possible line back to 1700 and showed me how she had got there. Like a fool I sat down and tried a different search - almost immediately turning up a likely link from 1674. We took the tree back to him and it looks as certain as one can be that this is her great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. That's a great number of greats - I think that makes her eleventh generation. Wow! I'm finding this quite exciting. She should have asked me in the first place! In the process of this search I noticed in one search a reference to an 18th century long case clock signed Edouard Renouf. I even found pictures of two different clocks by this bloke. I'm now searching for references to 18th century clocks to see if I can find more about the man and whether his family continued in the same profession. I can see I'm getting drawn into the net. But at least while I'm doing this I can get on to my computer to write this blog.
Saved in the tick of time.