Their only surviving daughter, Mary Catherine, known as Minnie, acted as Hurley's hostess in Washington, D.C., and eventually married patent attorney William Nathaniel Roach Jr., son of North Dakota United States Senator William N. Roach, Sr., grandson of Dr. Charles Liebermann (one of the Washington, D.C., physicians, who attended at the deathbed of Abraham Lincoln, and apparently a co-founder of Georgetown University School of Medicine), and stepbrother of Hollywood writer Channing Pollock.

Hurley, who began his working life as dockworker in New York City and who gradually made his way up to running his own dredging company, was a devout Roman Catholic, a devoted family man, and fairly florid and Victorian in his written prose style.

The Congressman's namesake grandson, attorney Denis M. Hurley (1898–1980) was Corporation Counsel of New York City during the administration of Mayor Impellitteri in the 1950s as well as lawyer for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Brooklyn.

Hurley died in Hot Springs, Virginia, where he had gone from Washington, D.C., to rest from the strains of ill health and from the disappointment of losing his seat in Congress in the November 1898, election.

Hurley was buried with his wife, mother, aunt, cousin, and infant children in a large family grave at Holy Cross Roman Catholic Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.