This is becoming much more important as people are becoming increasingly open about gender transition, etc., and asking to be addressed by their new names - their prior name is NOT a nickname, and we risk offending people by using their prior name, but we need a place to be able to record (and search) by their prior first name. PLEASE give this request some attention and at very least enable aliases to be searched by first and last name.

I completely 100% agree! We are having extreme difficulty finding people by former name. The instruction I received this morning is to put the entire former name (Former First Name and Former Last Name) in the search box that says: Last/Org Name. That is NOT intuitive at all. I should be able to put "Former Last Name" into the "Last/Org Name" search field and "Former First Name" (whether it remained the same OR changed) into the "First Name search field. Ideally, then, when I press FIND NOW, it would locate this person. It was also recommended to me, as it sounds like it was recommended to you, that we put the constituents Former First Name into the Nickname Field. I 100% DISAGREE with that and do not find it a suitable solution/work around at all. A Constituent's new First Name might actually have it's own nickname. This is an indicator to our team when calling that it might be acceptable to address them by the name in the nickname field. We also pull on the nickname in the salutations and addressee tab sometimes. So it would be a mistake to enter the Former First name into the nickname field. Former Names should reside in the Alias box, and be easily searchable in ways that make sense.