The most significant alterations to Nauvoo Lodge’s minute books had to do with the acceptance of petitions and examination of those applications by the Committee of Investigation. In the preface to his Official Minutes, Mervin Hogan speculated that upon granting a dispensation to Nauvoo Lodge, Abraham Jonas “must have encouraged [the officers of the lodge] to set to work directly and receive petitions for the degrees of Masonry from all the men in the vicinity who had an interest in becoming Masons,” and that the “enthusiastic vigor and accomplishment of the Nauvoo Brethren in their fruitful implementation of [Jonas’s] instructions must have appreciably exceeded [the Grand Master’s] most sanguine hopes.” Hogan continued to postulate, perhaps accurately, that during Jonas’s visit to Nauvoo in March 1842, the Grand Master must have reviewed the work that the lodge had performed up to that point and counseled the officers and brethren of Nauvoo Lodge to obtain a new minute book and recopy the record, changing it to make it appear as if no petitions had been received prior to the lodge’s March 17 meeting. A thorough comparison of Minute Book 1 and Minute Book 2 supports this idea. Of the fifty-seven petitions received by the lodge before it was installed, Bennett postdated forty-four of them in Minute Book 1 to make it appear as if those applications had been presented at lodge meetings between March 17 and June 2, 1842. For example, Bennett recorded in Minute Book 1 that the lodge received petitions from Jacob B. Backenstos, Reynolds Cahoon, and William F. Cahoon on December 30, 1841, and that the Committee of Investigation reported favorably on their petitions on February 3, 1842. Later on in Minute Book 1, Bennett postdated the receiving of these men’s petitions to March 17, and the report of the status of their applications to April 7. Continuing with this same example, when Clayton copied the contents of Minute Book 1 into Minute Book 2, he reported that the petitions of Backenstos, Cahoon, and Cahoon were presented to the lodge on March 17 and that the Committee of Investigation reported on these applications on April 7, with the earlier dates for these events being omitted from the record. Of the remaining thirteen petitions presented to the lodge before its official installation, Clayton recorded in Minute Book 2 that the reception and balloting of three of the applications occurred between January 21, 1843, and February 1, 1844. Ten petitions were never postdated.