Martha's father was Rev. Joseph Robert, a Baptist preacher and educator. Joseph was from a family of South Carolina planters and preachers and the town of Robertville is named for their family. Martha's mother, Adeline Lawton Robert, came from a family of Black Swamp Baptists near Robertville, and her father and brother were Confederate officers. Joseph became a professor and Baptist preacher and moved the family to Iowa and Ohio before the war. Martha's brother, General Henry Martyn Robert, went to West Point and became a Union officer in the Civil War and later wrote the famous "Robert's Rules of Order." General Sherman's army burned Robertville down. Mother Adeline was buried in Dayton, Ohio. Father Joseph returned to the South after the war to become president of the Augusta Institute, a school for training Black ministers, which would evolve into Morehouse College. When he died in Atlanta, Martha was named Executrix of his estate. Henry also returned to Dayton to help build levees known as "Robert's Fill" on the Great Miami River with their brother, James, and Robert Drive is named for them. Martha is buried in Dayton beside her mother, and James and his wife, Agnes, are also elsewhere in the cemetery. There is no evidence that Martha ever married or had children.

Some other details about Martha's life:

--attended Mt Holyoke Seminary in Massachusetts. Alumni directory mentions her being from Portsmouth, Ohio, and her death as being in Chicago, Ill.

--wrote and registered her will in Philadelphia, PA in the presence of her brother Henry 3 May 1887. Will was admitted into probate court in Chicago, Ill, in 1897.

--was in Burlington, Iowa for the census in both 1860 and 1870. Her father was there in 1870 as President of Burlington University, while Martha was keeping house. There is also a daughter, Adaline, listed as 11 months old.

--She is living with her father in Atlanta at a boarding house in the 1880 census, and he lists his occupation as "superintendent of a Baptist college" (this would be the school that becomes Morehouse College). She keeps listing her age as 25 in every census!

--She is executrix of her father's will in Atlanta in 1884

--conflicting evidence of her death as in Chicago, or Des Moines, and she is buried in Dayton, Ohio beside her mother

--brother James Robert lived in Dayton; Henry's first wife, Helen Thresher, was from Dayton; Henry helped James and the city of Dayton with the engineering of filling in the land between the Great Miami River and Monument and First Street. This levee project was called "Robert's Fill," and a bit of Robert Drive is there to this day, though it was once a magnificent Dayton boulevard. While this was a great accomplishment, it was also overwhelmed by the terrible flood of 1913, which resulted in the Miami Conservancy District being formed to build a new levee and dam system.