first name extraction by searching the comaa

this maybe a bit messy
Are you looking up newyork,ny and then only want to display newyork
if so
=LEFT(VLOOKUP(B2,$A$2:$A$10,1,FALSE),FIND(",",VLOOKUP(B2,$A$2:$A$10,1,FALSE),1)-1)

Where the names are in Column A
and the value to lookup is in B2

Otherwise attach a sample - see yellow banner on how to load a spreadsheet - so we can see your data layout, and results expected - with a description why

this does 2 lookups, hence why i say its messy and not sure how it will perform on large data files