Yeast replicative aging involves myriad changes to the basic biology of the yeast cell. Previously it was reported that replicatively old yeast mother cells lose their ability to silence genes at HML and HMR loci, suggesting that the SIR complex becomes non-functional in old cells. Here we performed pedigree analysis using a recently developed and exquisitely sensitive silencing reporter, in combination with a custom microfluidic device, to characterize age-associated loss of silencing. In hundreds of yeast pedigrees, we found no evidence that silencing loss at HML and HMR is related to yeast aging. Furthermore, when we quantified RNA from purified populations of replicatively old cells, we found that old cells' gene expression does not reflect silencing loss at HML and HMR. Although silencing was maintained in old cells, we successfully replicated previous experiments that showed that old Mata cells fail to respond to α-factor. This result was originally interpreted to mean that silencing is lost in old cells; however, we found that this effect depends on the α-factor concentration, and that old Mata cells respond efficiently to large doses of mating pheromone.