John Gilmer wrote:

Yes, I can attest to that. In 1953, there were two kinds of Romex on the
market: one had a white,
chalky outer cover with paper wrapped TW conductors, and the other had a
kind of silver black
coating that flaked off when installing it. The flaky stuff would get
into your skin. Both types,
at that time, were ungrounded Romex, and where there was an outlet near a
water pipe, or other such
plumbing, or grounded surface, a separate ground wire, from a spool of #14
bare wire, was installed
from the outlet box to the nearest cold water pipe and fastened to a strap
around the pipe. Maybe
you could find a spool of such bare wire and go ahead and run some grounds
to your outlets.

I would not count on such a "make shift" group for protection against shock.
Rather I would have a GFCI on each outlet or each circuit. A water pipe
ground would be OK for a ground for a radio receiver but for a "safety"
ground it's not "gud enuf." If you have a short you could end up with
"hot" water pipes and the break or fuse still letting power through.

Yes, I wouldn't recommend fastening the modern grounds to a water pipe nearby for the reason you
have mentioned. Somewhere down the line, somebody just might do some plumbing remodeling and put in
some plastic pipe instead, and the "ground" would, therefore, be lost. I was just recalling what
was done in the 50's. I would still recommend finding a spool of bare ground wire and fishing it
into the walls to the metal outlet boxes and then fastening the ends to a mainliner ground and
returning this to the panel for a good system ground. This way the original wiring wouldn't have to
be replaced. And if some connections were found to be aluminum to copper, they should have the
NO-OX compound put on them and then connected together.