Tombstone size and life expectancy: a cross-sectional analysis of cemetery data before the turn of the century.

The extent to which socioeconomic status was associated with life expectancy in the 19 and early part of the twentieth century is poorly understood. We sought to determine the association between a deceased individual's tombstone size, a potential marker of socioeconomic status, and their age of death in the late modern period. We conducted a cross-sectional study of 276 deceased individuals buried between 1820 and 1992 in a large cemetery in Quebec, Canada.