However, the family would move to Hutchesontown and it was there that he learned the game, playing, before Rugby Park, as a junior first for nearby Shawfield and then for Rutherglen Glencairn, whilst working as a brass-moulder. Meantime, he may well already have met Agnes Gillespie. They may even have grown up together and, whilst in 1930 she with her wider family appears to have left for the USA, she, but seemingly not they, would return. 

The reason for the parting of the ways between Nibloe and Kilmarnock had been a consequence of the 1932 Final. He was clearly expecting a benefit. It did not come. Instead he was transferred, forcing him leave his Scottish comfort zone and perhaps prompting him to propose, possibly long-distance. Whatever the background the result was that he and Agnes were married in Glasgow in 1933, eventually settling in Sheffield. 

In fact both Joe and Agnes would have their two children and spent the rest of their lives in the Steel City close to Hillsborough. On retirement from playing he became a full-time, reserve-team coach at the club. In the war he worked at a munitions factory locally. Post-war he became an electrical-checker at a Stocksbridge steel-works, whilst still coaching his old team part-time into the 1950s. And his death, in 1976 and just a month before his seventy-third birthday, would be as a widower officially in Oughtibridge, a village a short distance up the Don valley, Agnes having passed away in the city in 1973, but in fact in Middlewood right on its outskirts but not even a mile and half from the Wednesday ground.