John E. Ferling was born in Charleston, West Virginia on January 10, 1940, and raised in Texas City, Texas. Carol was born in Wisconsin and spent her childhood in the Northeast.

After obtaining his B.A. and M.A. degrees in History from Sam Houston State University and Baylor University, John taught history for two years in a high school in Orange, Texas. He subsequently earned a Ph.D. in History at West Virginia University and taught in colleges in Kentucky and Pennsylvania. He joined the faculty at the University of West Georgia in 1971, where he taught American History for 33 years before retiring from teaching in 2004.

Carol attended West Virginia University, where she earned a B.A. degree in History. She and John met there.

After Carol and John moved to Carrollton, Carol received an M.Ed. in Administrative Services from the University of West Georgia. She was the Assistant Director of Financial Aid at the University of West Georgia for nearly 20 years before retiring in 1992.

John enjoys research and writing as much as teaching. The first of his fifteen books, published in 1977, was a study of those who remained loyal to Great Britain in the American Revolution. John specialized in Early American history and all of his books focus on the colonial era, the American Revolution, or the politics of the early national period in the 1790s. He grew to love military history and wrote about the colonists’ wars with Native Americans, Britain’s intercolonial conflicts with France and Spain, and the War of Independence. Three of his most popular books were not military histories. They were a biography of John Adams, a history of the election of 1800, and the rivalry between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.

John and Carol established the John and Carol Ferling Fund at the Georgia Historical Society in 2022 to provide support to researchers accessing the Georgia Historical Society archival collection.