[1][2] The generally accepted version is that, by the turn of the 20th century, the last known group of passenger pigeons was kept by Professor Charles Otis Whitman at the University of Chicago.

[3] Whitman originally acquired his passenger pigeons from David Whittaker of Wisconsin, who sent him six birds, two of which later bred and hatched Martha in about 1885.

[11][12] Several years before her death Martha suffered an apoplectic stroke, leaving her weakened; the zoo built a lower roost for her as she could no longer reach her old one.

[14][16] From the 1920s through the early 1950s, she was displayed in the National Museum of Natural History's Bird Hall, placed on a small branch fastened to a block of Styrofoam and paired with a male passenger pigeon that had been shot in Minnesota in 1873.

[16] During this time, she left the Smithsonian twice: in 1966 to be displayed at the Zoological Society of San Diego's Golden Jubilee Conservation Conference and in June 1974 to the Cincinnati Zoo for the dedication of the Passenger Pigeon Memorial.

[18] Martha has been on public display in the Smithsonian's "Objects of Wonder" exhibit alongside a mountain gorilla skull since March 10, 2017.

[12] A Harvard historian has described Martha's remains as "an organic monument, biologically continuous with the living bird she commemorates, the embodiment of extinction itself.