The issue of burial representativeness is central to any attempt to reconstruct patterns of life and death in the past. Building on the work of Cannon (1995), we examine the impact of progressive inclusion on efforts to study the impact of industrialization and urbanization through the demographic distribution of mortality. To address this issue, we used a sample of 400 gravestones yielding a total of 881 individuals in the Hamilton Cemetery in Hamilton, Ontario. The data were sorted according to birth cohorts and analyzed by age and sex.