BuddyPress.org

Ok… so @brajesh was able to point be in the right direction on this…

The problem is that I was looking for a user ID of the person that sent the request that was trying to join the group… what I needed to do was SEARCH for my User ID in the wp-bp-notification table… this had the user’s id making the request listed as an ITEM not a userID (as the user ID was mine)…. once I deleted that it went away…

FYI: You can find User IDs in the tables themselves or you can use a plugin called REVEAL ID to find IDs in the WordPress back end…
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/reveal-ids-for-wp-admin-25/

Thanks Brajesh!