SIDNEY — Families often take shared traits for granted – straight hair, eye color, height, a crooked eyetooth.

Sisters Betty Bickford and Sandra Jane McDougal take nothing for granted. Bickford is more outgoing, McDougal is quieter.

Spend any time with them and you will hear their identical laughs, see the resemblance in their faces and notice that when they sit at the kitchen table, they both sit with hands clasped, leaning in at just about the same angle.

Although they lived in neighboring Kennebec County towns all their lives, drove on the same roads and knew some of the same people, and even though their sons have been friends for years, they did not meet until two years ago, when McDougal screwed up her courage and knocked on the door of Bickford’s home in August 2014.

MISSING PIECES

Bickford never lived with her mother, Helen Elizabeth Robinson. Robinson, she said, had a mental disability and spent her life in group homes. When Bickford was born in 1949, Robinson turned her infant daughter over to her mother, who already had raised 10 children of her own on the family farm in Rome.

Bickford grew up there with her grandparents and two uncles. Her grandfather had been injured in World War I and received a pension.

Bickford said her grandmother was 56 when she took in her granddaughter. Four years later, her health had declined, and she wasn’t able to take on a baby. Although Bickford was only 4, she knew something was happening, and she said that for as long as she can remember, she knew she had a sibling. “My grandmother told me. I’m glad she told me this is how it was.”

Growing up, going to school in Rome, Bickford wished for her sister, someone to confide in.

“There are things you just wouldn’t tell your grandmother,” she said.

McDougal learned in the middle of a childhood spat that she had been adopted by Leland and Marian Lofstrom.

“My bratty (adoptive) sister was trying to be mean. I guess she thought I needed to know,” McDougal said. Her parents confirmed that she and their older brother Eddie were adopted.

And that left her with the sense that part of her was missing,

Bickford and McDougal grew up, married, settled down.

Bickford tried everything she could think of over the years to try to find her sister. But as a sibling, she had no standing to get access to the sealed adoption records. Information could be disclosed only with the permission of the birth mother, and Bickford said her mother, whom she didn’t see until she was 17, wasn’t interested in giving it,

“She ended up at Pineland Farms,” Bickford said, a New Gloucester facility for the mentally disabled. “She confirmed I had a sibling.”

The baby’s given name was Helen Jane, and that’s the name Bickford was searching under.

At one point, she got her sister’s birth date from someone who was in a position to know. It was something, but it wasn’t enough.

“I always wondered, ‘Is she right here?” Bickford said.

McDougal, whose name had been changed to Sandra Jane, took a more measured approach. Although she wanted to know, she didn’t want to hurt her adoptive parents. But in the background was the compelling question: Why did her mother give her away?

At the same time, she wasn’t sure how, after a lifetime of separation, she would be received.

In another of the coincidences that have linked the sisters, Bickford graduated from high school with McDougal’s brother, but the sisters’ paths never crossed in high school because McDougal started high school the next year.

CLOSING THE CIRCLE

Bickford had spent some time searching for another member of her family – her father, whom she had never met, but who was also her sister’s father.

She knew he was Robert McKay of Fairfield Center and she knew he was about 20 years older than her mother.

She tracked down a phone book, saw McKays listed, and although she was nervous, she started dialing the phone.

“I asked, ‘Do you know a Bob McKay?'” she said.

Bickford had found her uncle, Coleman. He and his wife told her what they could, which wasn’t much because no one knew where Robert McKay was, but they had heard he had a daughter.

In 2011, Maine opened its adoption records, and McDougal got her birth certificate. From there, through an online search she found Robinson’s obituary and the name of her sister, then Betty Ouellette, of Sidney.

McDougal had no trouble finding Bickford’s home. That didn’t make knocking on that door any easier. But by August 2014, McDougal was ready to take the risk.

“I thought she was a saleswoman,” Bickford said, seated at her kitchen table only feet from that door. She invited the woman in.

“I asked her if her mother was Helen Robinson and if she was Betty Ouellette. I said, ‘I’m your sister,'” McDougal said.

And in the instant that Bickford wrapped her arms around her sister, the circle closed. “I feel like the circle of life has been completed,” McDougal said.

“I always felt like something was missing,” Bickford said. “I said to my children that it’s important to connect with your family. I can’t get over the fact that we were so close and so far apart.”

Bickford, 66, retired from Maine Revenue Services and spends half the year in Florida.

McDougal, 62, lives in Clinton and works three days a week at Goudreau’s Retirement Inn.

Since that summer day, they have met members of each other’s families, and they get together when they can.

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