Daily AncestorFeeble-minded
Feeble-minded was a label of the late 1800s and early 1900s for people judged to have an intellectual disability, often the mildest grade.
From the late 1800s, experts ranked mental deficiency in grades: idiot for the most severe, imbecile in the middle and feeble-minded for the mildest. The word was also used loosely for every grade, as in the names of state schools for the feeble-minded, such as New York's Syracuse institution from 1891.
The label was closely tied to the eugenics movement of the early 1900s. When an ancestor is called feeble-minded in a school, court or institution record, read it as a classification of its time, not a precise diagnosis.
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Daily Ancestor. "Feeble-minded." Dictionary of Old Record Words. https://dailyancestor.com/dictionary/poor-relief/feeble-minded. Last checked 2026-10-03.