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[PatrikLundell]

mikekchar mentioned a number of legitimate reasons for why civs that look dead aren't. Unfortunately, there's also a bug that causes most of them not to die properly: entities have a number of non hist fig members, and that number isn't decreased properly when civs stop being functional, and a civ isn't dead until this number is zero.
In addition to this, dead civs are culled from the list of civs you can embark as, so you can only embark as a dead civ if all of them are dead.

If you allow necro towers to spring up, you may get a few necro dorfs in the world as well.

If you're playing a truly dead civ and are OK with the two first migrant waves you don't need to play with pop caps at all (at least until socializing gets fixed, in which case you may want to restrict births, but until then you need to engineer most marriages and pregnancies).

It's easier to get dead civs in a world where there are many, but since you don't want any dorfs around you should set [MAX_STARTING_CIV_NUMBER:1] for dwarves to ensure that when/if it's clobbered, that's it.

I've got a couple of DFHack scripts to make an extremely tedious process of getting dead civs to only become tedious:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=165084.msg7526484#msg7526484. With a single dwarven civ you don't need permit_dead, as there's no culling of a single dead civ. Slabciv is used to set the non hist fig population of a civ to 0 if there's been no hist fig nor any population changes for 100 years and the civ doesn't have any sites to work around the non dying bug (the script occasionally kills off a civ that for some reason gets a hist fig after over 100 years, though). In addition to that, I use PSV worlds where I set up the dwarven civ (i.e. the only mountains in the map) close to goblins, and have a high megabeast and titan count to increase the chance of the dorfs being killed off.
If the dwarven site isn't lost within 100-150 years it probably won't be, and I abort and restart the world gen.

Also note that a gobbo conquest might lead to dwarven prisoners->gobbo civ members, although gobbo conquests usually results in dwarven refugees that keep the dwarven civ alive.

If you're going for a "struggling" civ, you need to use the pop cap to control migration, e.g. set it to 1 after the first migrant two waves. However, a struggling civ will saddle you with a monarch after at most two years (or was it one?), and the dwarven caravan shows up regularly in principle ("in principle" because there are many reasons for caravans to fail to show up). A struggling civ can send you unlimited numbers of migrants, creating void dorfs as needed.

[PatrikLundell]

If your civ is truly dead, there won't be any dwarven hist figs belonging to your civ in your world. If it's "merely struggling" it will keep generating migrants. Thus, with a dead civ you don't need to bother with the pop cap, but with a struggling one you do, as migrants will keep arriving until you hit the pop cap (you can also have sufficiently high death rates that they don't dare migrate to your fortress, and sieges blocking their arrival).

[MAX_STARTING_CIV_NUMBER] has absolutely nothing to do with number of dwarves: it's the maximum number of dwarven CIVS in the world. With a single civ, if it's actually killed, you'll be able to embark as it anyway, but without doing anything else, somewhere between 90 and 99.9% of all world gens that sees the loss of the only dwarven site will still be considered struggling. With slabciv you should increase the rate of dead ones a bit, maybe to 25% if you're lucky.

Also note the other differences between a truly dead civ and one that's only struggling.

The only known certain way to determine if a civ is considered dead is to look at the civ screen's civ screen immediately after embark: if it is blank the civ is actually dead, but if your dwarven civ is listed it's struggling/dying. The embark warning is useless as a distinction as it doesn't make any. With multiple playable civs, permit_dead actually adding civs to the list of civs you can embark as is a good indication those civs are actually considered dead (100% as far as I know), but that won't help with a single civ.

[mikekchar]

This is what I would personally suggest because it's easy :-)  If your goal is "virtually none left", I think you can easily role play the differences easily.  I've done that in the past.  Getting the monarch makes your game harder, not easier and I think it's cool for your revived civ to have a monarch.  Setting the pop cap should take care of void dwarfs, but if you get a caravan, you can RP it as 3 or 4 of the world's remaining dwarfs forced to be travelling merchants to make a living.  To make your game harder, you can decide that you have to tithe 20% of your fortress's income in a year or some such, without being able to buy anything.  Or... you can just not build a trade depot.  They'll wander by, but won't trade.

The one thing I *don't* know about is hill dwarfs and other land holdings... you'll have to do science there.

[PatrikLundell]

Like mikekchar, I'm in the dark regarding how hill dwarves are affected by the difference between a dead and a "struggling" civ. I'll have to start over with a new fortress, as raiding doesn't work in my current one, so in a few months I'll know if I get any hill dwarves (I did get elves in a cave linking themselves to my site economically, but that was known to happen already).