Sarah was born perhaps in Brooke Co., Virginia (now Hancock Co., West Virginia) and accompanied her family to Grafton, Illinois, as a child of about six years. The brief period in Illinois proved devastating to the family with the loss of Sarah's father and two of her sisters. Her widowed mother apparently returned with her four surviving children to Virginia in 1838, and in 1841 they removed to Carroll Co., Missouri, where three of her mother's siblings had recently settled. The first decade in Missouri was probably quite difficult for the Hale family, and they seem to have relied substantially upon their Blackwell relatives there in those early years. Hardship was finally overcome and, at least in the case of Sarah's brother John Blackwell Hale, was the impetus for surprising success.

Those difficult times perhaps account for Sarah's marriage – around age sixteen – to Ingram Standley. He was the son of John and Lucy Standley, pioneers of north-central Missouri from North Carolina. Ingram had been a young child when his family went to Missouri and, according to legend, his younger brother Thomas was the first white child born in what would become Carrollton Twp., Carroll Co., Missouri. Ingram came to young manhood in troubled times in America, when the young nation suffered, at once, scandals in the Administration, a financial panic and no fewer than three domestic military ventures.

The refusal of Florida's Seminole Indians to be driven westward, led to an intervention against them by federal troops, and seventeen year old Ingram Standley served in the army's expedition against the Seminoles. He was a private in the company commanded by Captain Sconce of Missouri volunteers in the "Spy Battalion" of Lt. Col. Morgan, having joined in September 1837 and arriving in Florida before Christmas of that year. He was honorably discharged back in Missouri in March of the next year. His service in the conflict against the Seminoles qualified Ingram for a land grant in Carroll County in 1852. By that time he had married Sarah Hale.

The census of 1850 reported the household of Ingram and Sarah Standley in Carroll County which included their first three children, Margaret, Alfred, and Charles, and Sarah's mother Mary E. Hale. Before the next census a decade later, Mary Elizabeth, so long a struggling widow, was married to David Bruton. In 1852 Ingram Standley received eighty acres of land for his service in the Seminole War and, at least from that time until his death in 1878, the Standleys resided in Trotter Twp., Carroll Co., Missouri. Ingram's grave is marked with an engraved headstone. Sarah died on November 7, 1896, according to "a Bible record," although "no tombstone has been found." (Bio by Mark Hale)