Hurley Family Tree

Enoch Hurley appears in the records of Greene County, Pennsylvania, from at least 1809 — when an early Franklin Township tax list names him among the "single men" — through the 1820 federal census, by which point he was enumerated in neighboring Morris Township. This is not evidence that he moved: the townships in this corner of Greene County were repeatedly redrawn during these years (Morris Township was organized around 1798–99 partly from Franklin Township territory, and Center Township was carved from both in 1820), so a resident could be shifted from one township's records to another's without ever changing farms.

Enoch's land itself was an unusually shaped tract — a long, narrow strip roughly 412 perches (just over 1 mile) in length and only about 33.6 perches wide, with a triangular projection at one end. Despite Enoch living on it for at least 27 years, the tract was never formally surveyed by the Pennsylvania Land Office during his residency. It was finally warranted on 11 March 1844 — to a Reverend Cox — and surveyed eleven days later, on 29 March, to George Keigly, placing it in Washington Township, Greene County. No deed bearing Enoch's name has been located in the county records.

Taken together, this points to Enoch having lived on the land for decades as an actual settler without ever formally warranting, surveying, or patenting it himself — a common arrangement on the Pennsylvania frontier, where occupation and local tax assessment could stand in for formal title indefinitely. The 1844 warrant and survey, issued eight years after Enoch's 1836 departure for Meigs County, Ohio, most likely reflects the property finally being formalized by a subsequent occupant or purchaser, rather than any transaction involving Enoch.

Supporting this as Enoch's neighborhood across the whole span: the 1844 survey's adjoining landowners — Jesse Pettit, Isaac Pettit, and Samuel Garner — closely echo the Pettit and Garner households listed immediately near Enoch on the 1820 census (Matthew Garner and two Nathaniel Pettits). An Isaac Pettit also served as a township assessor there as early as 1798–99, suggesting a long-established Pettit family presence in the immediate vicinity across the whole period — likely the same neighborhood, quite possibly the same tract, spanning at least one generation of these adjoining families.