Co-workers at store discover they are brothers

For weeks, Randy Joubert and Gary Nisbet laughed off customers’ comments that the two furniture deliverymen looked similar enough to be brothers. It wouldn’t be long before fate would prove the old adage, the customer is always right. Joubert said something in him clicked after yet another customer asked the same question during a routine delivery in late August.

Prefacing his line of questioning with the statement, “Don’t think I’m weird,” Joubert asked his co-worker a few pointed questions based on names and dates gleaned from his own adoption records. Seconds later, Joubert realized that the man who had been on the other end of countless couches, mattresses and recliners since July wasn’t just a co-worker. Nisbet was the long-lost brother for whom he had been searching.



“I said, ‘Gary, do you understand what I am telling you? We are brothers,’” Joubert, 36, recalled Friday. “I think I kept saying that. We had a few more deliveries and it was just the Twilight Zone. I went home and I just dropped,” said Nisbet, 35. “I thought, ‘I think I have a brother.’”

It’s a story that seems too perfect even for a movie: Two brothers, born a year apart, grow up in adoptive families in neighbouring towns and attending rival schools. As adults, each lives in Waldoboro but spends 35 years not knowing about the other’s existence. Then they end up not only working for the same small business, in this case Dow Furniture in Waldoboro, but also riding together in the same delivery truck day after day.



Yet somehow, their amazing story doesn’t end there. On Thursday, a teary-eyed woman from nearby Warren showed up at the furniture gallery claiming to be their half-sister — and she had the birth certificate and other paperwork to prove it.

Joubert said there is only one explanation: fate. “It has to be,” he said Friday. “All of these things had to happen” to bring the group together. “I’m really awestruck,” said Joanne Campbell, who was born to the same mother five and six years before the two men. “After all of these years, here I am 41 and now I finally found my brothers.”