use strict;
use warnings;

my %family = (
    'Connie'    => 'Mama',
    'Brandy'    => 'Sissy',
    'Pete'      => 'Dude',
    'Tristan'   => 'Stinky',
    'Sophera'   => 'Finky',
    'priscilla' => 'BearDawg'
);

print "Please type in your name:\n";
my $name = <STDIN>;
chomp $name;

if (exists $family{$name}) {
    print "Hey $name, thank you for being my family!\n";
}
else {
    print "Thank you $name for participating but you are not family.\n
+";
}
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#use strict
#use warnings
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That's the first mistake: don't comment out these lines, they are your first sanity check. And declare your variables with my.

$name=<stdin>;

Did you mean STDIN instead? Perl is case sensitive.

%family[...

That's not Perl syntax. Please read perlintro, perlsyn and perldata. Or even buy yourself a good Perl book, like "Learning Perl".

Perl still supports the lower case forms of stdin, stdout and stderr:

$ perl -le'/std/i && print for keys %::'
stderr
stdout
stdin
STDOUT
STDERR
STDIN

$ perl -le'print stdout "Hello" or die $!'
Hello
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But to get it to work with strict and warnings enabled is a bit more difficult:

$ perl -Mwarnings -Mstrict -le'print {*stdout} "Hello" or die $!'
Hello
$ perl -Mwarnings -Mstrict -le'print {\*stdout} "Hello" or die $!'
Hello
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#!/usr/local/bin/perl
#Family.pl
use strict;
use warnings;

my %family = ('Connie'   =>'Mama',
              'Brandy'   =>'Sissy',
              'Pete'     =>'Dude',
              'Tristan'  =>'Stinky',
              'Sophera'  =>'Finky',
              'Priscilla'=>'BearDawg');

print"Please type in your name: ";
my $name = <STDIN>;
chomp $name;         # It's good to chomp

 # Convert to lower case with uc first char
$name = ucfirst(lc $name);  

# Check for the absence of $name as a key
if( !exists $family{$name}) {
    print"Thank you $name for participating but you are not family.\n"
+;
}
else {
    print"Hey $family{$name}, thank you for being family!\n";
}
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I created a cleaned up version of your code, but toolic beat me to it. His version is identical to what I cam up with, except mine lacked the  exists in the if, so I won't bother putting mine here

I found this article, The Perl Hash How-To, to be very valuble. I used to keep a copy pinned to the wall next to my desk because I was always getting screwed up by syntax.

As for your program, you had some misplaced commas and brackets instead of parenthesis where you created your hash. You had forward slashed where you needed backslashes for the newlines, and you had newlines in odd places (the newline escape sequence, '\n', needs to be in doublequotes to be interpreted as you expect).

Also, you need to chomp your input, otherwise you end up with a trailing newline character that will cause a mis-match, even if you enter what you think should be a match.

I'm not too familiar with Ruby - is the style of comparison you use how you determine if a value is in a hash in that language? I've not looked at too much Ruby code but I seem to recall seeing something similar. Here a node about comparing hash values, and an article at Perl.com with some good has info.

It looks like Perl syntax is your stumbling block, as well as perhaps habits learned from another language. It shouldn't take much more than a bit of practice, and maybe reading over someone else's code or some Perl documentation to get past that :)