That would be James H. Massey b. 1779 in Ireland, died 1864 in Springfield, Missouri, who married Faithful Elizabeth Strickland (she died in Springfield in 1834).

"Born in Ireland, where he spent his boyhood and attended school. When eighteen years of age he ran away from home and sailed on broad Atlantic toward the United States to seek his fortune. He first settled in Knox County, Tennessee, at the foot of the Cumberland Mountains, regarding whose picturesque inhabitants so much has been written, and in that locality he was married and made his home until the year 1832, when he made the tedious and somewhat hazardous overland trip to Greene county, Missouri, bringing his family in a primitive wagon, and thus the Masseys were among the earliest pioneers of this locality.
He secured a tract of land just east of what is now the thriving city of Springfield, but which was at that time an encampment of the Kickapoo Indians.
He set to work with a will, cleared, broke and fenced his land, erected a log cabin and by perseverance and hard work became very comfortably fixed in due course and time, and was a man of influence among the early frontiersmen, his neighbours being, however, very few and most of them some miles distant, untill more Tennesseeans followed him, the Fulbrights, the Freemans and others.
Although he devoted the major portion of his life to farming, he was a mechanic by trade and a skilled workman. He made the first separator, or "ground-hog" tresher, ever seen in this part of the country.
During the war of 1812, he enlisted in defense of his adopted country, gladly figting against the flag under which he was born, and for meritoruius conduct on the field of battle he was promoted from a private to a captain, and served with distinction throughout the war.
Politically he was first a Whig, then a Republican after that party was organized in the fifties.
His death occured on his farm here in 1863.
His first wife was Faithful Strickland, she bore him 13 children. Among them Nathaniel J., William, Mrs. Mc Adams, Mrs. Rountree. William was a quarter master in the Union Army during the Civil War.
His second wife, Martha Ellen Anderson, was a native of Tennessee, where she grew up and recieved a limited education. She lived to an advanced age, dying in Stone County, Missouri, in February 1899. To these parents nine children were born.

Greene County, Missouri, History Book, pages 1927-29"