WALDOBORO, Maine — Seven years into his tenure as a furniture mover for a local bedding retailer, Gary Nisbet was joined by a new colleague, Randy Joubert, who looked so much like him that customers asked whether they were brothers.
“We thought they were just trying to razz us,” Joubert said.
Turns out the customers were on to something. They really are brothers — and the attention they got after finding each other also has turned up a sister.
The two men were adopted as babies, then attended rival high schools and even lived in neighboring towns on the Maine coast before working together at Dow’s Sleep Center in tiny Waldoboro and uncovering their relationship.
“This kid could have been anywhere in the world, and here I am riding in a Dow furniture truck with him,” Joubert said Monday.
Joubert’s adoptive mother, Jacqueline Joubert of Grand Island, Fla., said she and her late husband raised him with four sisters. She said he knew from a young age he was adopted and she wasn’t surprised he would try to find his biological siblings when he grew up.
Dow’s hired Randy Joubert on July 7, and soon afterward co-workers began commenting on how similar he and Nisbet looked.
Both are light-haired, wear glasses and have stocky builds. Their goatees and curled-brim baseball caps add to the effect.
Joubert, 36, laughed off the commentary but admits he noticed the similarities himself, even mentioning them to his fiancee.
He started taking the comments more seriously when people also took notice while he and Nisbet, 35, were out making deliveries.
“Customers would ask if we were brothers more often than not,” he said. “Then my brain started heading that way.”
Joubert had already taken advantage of a new state law allowing adoptees to see their original birth certificates and found out the names of his biological parents, who had died by then.
With further help from statistics officials, he also learned that he had a brother — and his brother’s original name. Joubert and Nisbet had been removed from their birth parents’ home because the couple could not properly care for them.
Well armed with details, Joubert posed a few questions to Nisbet while the two were making deliveries about three weeks ago.
“I said, ‘Gary, I’m going to ask you a strange question: Are you adopted?’ ” Joubert recalled.
Nisbet gave him a strange look and answered, yes, he was adopted.
Then Joubert asked whether Nisbet knew his parents’ names. Nisbet, who had learned details of his adoption through a court request, again answered yes.
Joubert recited the couple’s names — only to meet a mixed reaction of amazement and annoyance.
“He takes off his hat and says, ‘How did you know that?’ ” Joubert recalled.
When Joubert asked about Nisbet’s birth date, June 10, 1974, he knew he had found his long-lost brother.
“I about fell over,” he said, “because I knew that date.”
Nisbet, the quieter of the two, said he was “star-struck and blown away. I couldn’t even believe it.”
He was raised with three brothers and a sister in his adoptive family but never knew he had a biological brother.
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