If you have a file called 'needles' containing the following:

washington, martha
adams, jane

And a file called 'haystack' containing the following:

blah blah blah washington, martha blah
all work and no play
makes adams, jane a dull
girl

You should be able to use grep -i -f needles haystack.

If, however, 'needles' contains:

"washington, martha"
"adams, jane"

you will need to use grep -i -f <(sed 's/"//g' needles) haystack to strip the double-quotes off of the names. Unless, that is, you want to search for only the names when quoted.

Naturally, this will not work for cases of 'haystack' such as

And on that day she changed her name to adams,
jane.

If you have a file called 'needles' containing the following:

washington, martha
adams, jane

And a file called 'haystack' containing the following:

blah blah blah washington, martha blah
all work and no play
makes adams, jane a dull
girl

You should be able to use grep -i -f needles haystack.

If, however, 'needles' contains:

"washington, martha"
"adams, jane"

you will need to use grep -i -f <(sed 's/"//g' needles) haystack to strip the double-quotes off of the names. Unless, that is, you want to search for only the names when quoted.

Naturally, this will not work for cases of 'haystack' such as

And on that day she changed her name to adams,
jane.

If someone on your list is inspired by The Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince and has decided to put a double-quote into their actual name, you can make the sed a little more explicit and only strip the leading and trailing quote from each line with grep -i -f <(sed 's/^"//;s/"$//' needles) haystack.