Carroll Paul Hungate was born July 31, 1904 to John Thomas and Meta Hungate in Emporia, Lyon County, Kansas. His father J. T. at the time worked as chief clerk first at the Atchison, Topeka, & Sante Fe (A.T.S.F.) railroad offices in Emporia and then at the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas (M.K.T. or Katy) Railroad offices.

Carroll P. Hungate earned his medical degree and married Mary Agnes Patterson, the daughter of Frank P. and Ida Belle (Devaney) Patterson. Frank and Ida Patterson had married in 1898 in Harrisonville, Cass County, Missouri, and they had two children, Howard and Mary Agnes, before he died in 1908. Ida later worked as a house mother at Goffe House with the Kansas City Arts Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, retiring from that position in 1950.

Carroll and Mary Agnes had two daughters, Mary Agnes and Annabel, and lived for a while in Medford, Massachusetts. By 1940 they were back in Kansas City, Missouri. At the end of World War II, Dr. Hungate was serving in the Naval Reserves with a rank of commander and was stationed in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

In circa 1952, Mary Agnes Hungate married Kenneth Grubb. In 1953, Annabel Hungate married Joseph Allen Christy. Both women had attended the University of Kansas prior to marrying, and both had been members of the Phi Beta Pi sorority.

In the late 1970s, Carroll P. Hungate served as the second president of the then-newly-formed Hungate Family Historical Society, publishing a book on the family's genealogy.