Kevin, if you don’t mind, I’m interested what you mean by the first system ending with a partial measure and the second system including vocals beginning with a partial measure? If you mean to break in the middle of one continuous measure, you could do this without partials via. \bar “” \break
I'm on vacation and continuing with LilyPond in my down hours. So, I haven't been reading e-mail as quickly as normal. You've interpreted what I meant exactly, but I managed to figure out that adding a \bar was required. I had the \break but that wasn't enough.