Thomas Goode Jones (November 26, 1844 – April 28, 1914) was an Alabama lawyer, politician, and military officer. He served in the Alabama legislature and as Governor of Alabama. He later became United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama and the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama. Family and early life He was born on November 26, 1844, in Vineville (now Macon, Georgia to Martha Goode (1821–1861) and her husband, railroad builder Samuel Jones (1815–1886), who had moved to Georgia in 1839 to become an assistant engineer on the Monroe Railroad, which soon declared bankruptcy. Despite financial problems around Thomas's birth, Samuel Goode would become an engineer on various other railroads in Alabama and Florida, one of Alabama's early industrialists, and briefly, an Alabama legislator representing Lee County, Alabama. He also remarried during the Civil War to Aurora Serena Elmore, who was descended from Representative Joseph Brevard of South Carolina and would bear seven boys (Thomas's step-brothers) during their marriage. Shortly before the war began, Samuel Jones completed the Alabama and Florida Railroad, which supplied the Confederate Navy Yard in Pennsacola. He also helped establish the Chewacla Lime Works, the Montgomery and Talladega Sulphur Mines, and the Muscogee Lumber Company and completed a railroad line connecting Montgomery and Selma, Alabama, shortly before the Civil War ended, and then the Savannah and Memphis Railroad. Even more than the Jones family, the Goodes were among the First Families of Virginia. John Goode had arrived in Virginia via Barbados before 1661 and established a tobacco plantation in Henrico County. His descendant Samuel Goode, of Chesterfield County, served as a lieutenant during the American Revolutionary War and as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates and the US House of Representatives. His son Thomas Goode (1787–1858), Martha's father, helped establish the Homestead European-style spa in Wythe County, Virginia. The Jones traced their descent from Captain Roger Jones, who commanded a British naval vessel in Chesapeake Bay in 1680 and whose youngest son, Thomas, settled near Fortress Monroe in what became Brunswick County, Virginia. Thomas's descendant John Jones represented Brunswick County in the Virginia House of Burgesses and became a captain in a Virginia regiment during the American Revolutionary War. His son Dr. Thomas Williamson Jones (1788–1824), graduated from the University of North Carolina before he married Mary Armistead Goode. Their