How did they meet?

I suppose we can only very rarely know how and why and where they met back then. There was Sarah Pond, aged 25, ‘servant’, whose father William was an Essex farmer, and there was Joseph Stanley, 25, ‘carriage fitter E.C.R.’, whose father was Edward, also a farmer, from the borders of Staffordshire and Derbyshire. Sarah and Joseph married at St Leonard’s Shoreditch, on August 24th 1854. Both gave their residence as 5, Edward Street – an address of convenience for one or both? I think Edward Stanley farmed land in Tutbury and/or Scropton, and William Pond in Upminster. I have some census references for them and also what seems an odd one – and one that contributes to wondering how Joseph and Sarah (b.Upminster, Essex) met – that she was in 1851 a servant aged 22 in a Harrison family household in Maidstone, Kent. As to the Stanleys, had there been a connection to the Stanleys, Earls of Derby?

Joseph and Sarah’s daughter, Florence Lilla (or Lilian) Stanley, b.1873 in Hackney, by which time Joseph was a ‘house painter’, married (in the Register Office at West Ham, 1894) George Keen Brown, a railway worker who later became a maker of piano keys. Their daughter, Annie Edith Brown, married George Cole (from Tendring on the Suffolk/Essex border, merchant seaman and when I knew him a London bus driver). Their daughter, Doris Lilian Cole, was my mother; born in Leyton.