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LA GOLISSE, Switzerland — Marie-Lise Renaud, who will turn 89 in September, is comfortable in the traditional wood chalet that her father had built in 1937, overlooking farmland framed by pine forests and mountain peaks. Even when she was away for some years, she visited often. And she lives here now.

The chalet is in the tiny hamlet of La Golisse, tucked between Le Sentier and Le Brassus, the Vallée de Joux villages with the headquarters of some of the world’s most famous watchmakers — including Audemars Piguet, Blancpain and (so close to the chalet you could hit it with a snowball) Jaeger-LeCoultre.

To Mrs. Renaud, some of those names aren’t just brands; they are the names of relatives and childhood friends. Growing up in this area, life revolved around “watches and family,” pure and simple, she said, eyes twinkling.

For example, her son, the celebrated independent watchmaker Dominique Renaud, created a family tree with branches including at least nine generations. And there is a LeCoultre on pretty much every one.

Mrs. Renaud’s maiden name is Meylan, and her family’s roots also have their watchmaking claims to fame.

In the 1800s, Simeon Meylan, a relative who farmed much of the year, spent winters doing what so many in the valley did when the cold weather arrived: He made watches.

“In spring he would walk to Geneva to try and sell them,” Mrs. Renaud said. The journey took a couple of days, and he always stopped to sleep along the way under the same tree. Today, along the Col du Marchairuz, the pass high in the Jura Mountains, there is a statue of him, under the tree, taking his nap.

Over a lunch she made of grilled Swiss sausage and potato gratin, she displayed a postcard from 1903 showing a watchmaker at work at the Jaeger-LeCoultre atelier; it’s a photo that has appeared in many books and exhibitions about watchmaking. The man is Mrs. Renaud’s great-grandfather, Henri Meylan.

Mrs. Renaud’s father, Charles Meylan, also worked at Jaeger-LeCoultre for more than 50 years. Unlike today, “there was no retirement plan, so he had to work,” even after he lost the use of one eye, Mrs. Renaud said. He used to cut, by hand, the gemstones used in movements.

“He was the last one doing it by hand,” she said. “The job does not exist any more.”

Mrs. Renaud’s job in the 1940s and ’50s, first at Jaeger-LeCoultre and then at Vacheron Constantin, isn’t the same anymore, either. She was a régleuse, the name for a worker who balanced a watch’s spiral, or hairspring, often a piece so small it was barely visible to the naked eye.

The job was done only by women because, as Grégory Gardinetti, history expert at the industry’s Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie, explained, “Women were viewed as precise, and worked with finesse.”

Mrs. Renaud also displayed a photo taken in 1956 at the Vacheron Constantin atelier in Geneva. “The two men in front are the watchmakers,” she said, because at that time “only men were allowed to be watchmakers.

“And the women behind” — a group of maybe six, all wearing white smocks — “are the régleuses,” she said. Peeking out from the back of the group is Mrs. Renaud. “Today the job is done mostly by machines.”

For this visit with his mother, Dominique Renaud brought a special memento: the balance wheel that Mrs. Renaud got when she was at school and then worked with for decades, finally giving it to her son when she retired. As she cradled it in her hands, her eyes filled with tears.

So many memories. When Mrs. Renaud was growing up in Le Sentier, the watch industry was “all families, not corporations,” she said.

And there was almost no way to escape a career in watchmaking — if not involved in their actual creation, then working with them at some level, even if as clerk or janitor.

Like nearly all the village children, Mrs. Renaud attended Le Sentier’s local grammar school before crossing the street to go to L’Ecole Technique, then called L’Ecole de l’Horlogerie, for training as a régleuse.

One of her schoolmates and friends was Michele Piguet, from the family that founded Audemars Piguet. “She married a Mr. Audemars, but not of the Audemars family,” Mrs. Renaud said. Today their son, Olivier Piguet Audemars, is on the board of Audemars Piguet.

“In my day, Audemars Piguet was small, with maybe 10 people working in it,” Mrs. Renaud said. “Jaeger-LeCoultre and Vacheron Constantin had the same owner, Jacques-David LeCoultre.” To hear her tell it, the atmosphere was more collaborative than competitive. “When Audemars Piguet got in trouble, Jaeger-LeCoultre bought shares in it to help, to keep the business running between the families,” she said. “That spirit doesn’t exist anymore.”

Now, Mrs. Renaud and her son both said, young people usually want to leave this region of about 5,000 residents for several reasons, like looking for a more varied job market or a place where it doesn’t snow as much. “If you look at a photo of the Vallée de Joux from 50 years ago, it looks the same as today,” Mr. Renaud said.

Luiggino Torrigiani, Mr. Renaud’s business partner, who was along for the visit, added jokingly: “Watches are not even really Swiss-made anymore.”

“The workers now come over the border from France” — about 10 miles away, he said. “They come here in the morning to get Swiss pay and then drive home across the border at night.”

At one point, even Mrs. Renaud crossed the border to live in France. She met her future husband, Michel Renaud, when she went to work at Vacheron Constantin in Geneva. But when he was hired as chief of technical services at the technical center for watches in Besançon, France, the newlyweds moved. Dominique Renaud was born there in 1959, and graduated first in his class at the French national watchmaking school, before moving to Switzerland in 1980, to work at Audemars Piguet in the complications workshop in Le Brassus.

Mr. Renaud has kept the watchmaking notebooks of his parents, grandparents and in-laws, all handwritten and with highly detailed sketches. He credits them with helping his own career, including as a founder of Renaud & Papi, a company known for its complications. That company is now owned by Audemars Piguet and known as APRP. Mr. Renaud recently created a revolutionary watch, the DR01 Twelve First, which sells for 1 million Swiss francs ($990,000).

Part of the reason for the price: He invented a movement that increases a watch’s accuracy — one that, ironically, eliminates the hairsprings that his mother worked on for all those years.

“I am very proud of my son,” Mrs. Renaud said. And not just because of his achievements in watchmaking, but because of what, in her world, really matters: “He’s a very kind man.”