He was born into the Roman Catholic Transdanubian Hungarian noble family Farkas de Kisbarnak.
His maternal grandparents were dr. Ágoston Pottyondy de Potyond et Csáford, lawyer, and Mária Grohmann (1840-1918).
His paternal uncle was Gyula Farkas de Kisbarnak (1847–1930), Hungarian mathematician and physicist.
His brother was Ferenc Farkas de Kisbarnak, General of the Hungarian VI Army Corps during World War II.
In the 1920s Gyula was a coworker of Róbert Gragger (1887–1926) at the Hungarian Institute of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin.