How I found my nine times great-grandfather in a Prague museum

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Quite often it happens that people ask me if I have Czech roots. It seems quite logical. I speak Czech, I've spent nearly half my life here, my children consider themselves Czech and I seem to be settled here for good. But I have no family links with the Czech Republic - or at least that is what I thought until recently.

On my father's side I come from a family of London artist-artisans. I still have cousins who are furniture makers in the East End, continuing a family tradition going back over three hundred years. Some of my ancestors were also clock-makers.

When our 2003 winner in Radio Prague's listeners' competition, Chris Nuttall, came to Prague, I got into conversation with her husband Tony, who turned out to be a clock restorer. I mentioned that my - I think nine times - great grandfather, William Jourdain, had been a London clock-maker in the first half of the 18th century.

Many months later, just after another visit to Prague, Tony sent me a letter that came as a big surprise. He wrote that he'd visited the Museum of Decorative Arts and that they had a clock that I really ought to have a look at. He told me where it was, adding that it was pretty much impossible to miss.

I headed off for the museum, I must admit, somewhat sceptically, along with my seven-year-old son. As always in this country, there was a rather intimidating elderly lady sitting at the entrance on the first floor, but when I told her why we'd come she was very happy to let us in, without insisting that we bought a ticket for the whole museum.

The clock - a large longcase, or grandfather - was quite out of the ordinary, and Tony Nuttall was right - you certainly couldn't miss it. It was decorated with hugely extravagant and heavily Baroque gilded carved figures, all around what was probably initially a fairly plain case. The clock face itself was in stark contrast: sober and simple, and above the dial - there it was: "William Jourdain, London" etched into a separate smaller dial. I looked at my son and told him, not so much with pride as with a sense that perhaps after all, something really did bond us with Prague, that this was his ten times great grandfather. Although I don't think genealogy is a favourite topic among seven-year-olds, I think he was quite impressed.

The curator of clocks at the museum was delighted to find out more about the name on the clock face, and she told me that the clock had originally been in the Svaty Kopecek monastery in the depths of Moravia. The extravagant carving added to the case was the work of the well-known Baroque carver and sculptor, Josef Winterhalter, who had carried out the decorative work at the monastery, all in high Baroque style. I couldn't help wondering whether my ancestor, who was by origin a French protestant and refugee from religious persecution, knew that his clock face and movement were destined to end up encased in such ebullient - and very Catholic - Rococo swirls. I suspect that either he didn't or that he knew a good commission when it came round. Either way, I doubt we shall ever know how his clock came to be in Moravia.

And one last detail. The curator took me upstairs to a huge and slightly dusty room, full of exhibits that aren't kept on show. She pointed out another clock - this time in a much more simple case. "That's another by William Jourdain," she told me. The face and movement were almost identical to first clock. Perhaps my nine times great-grandfather had a thriving trade with Central Europe.

Seeing those two clocks in the museum just across the river from where I now live - in this city that will always be foreign to me - made me feel just a little bit more at home.