n.b. Pay particular attention to the square brackets that appear in the above code-sample, vs. your original post.   It does not matter that the word People is or isn’t in-quotes ... what does matter are the square-brackets indicating an array of (in this case) hash-references.

Perl data structures can become quite intricate because you can certainly have more than one reference to the same hash (or whatever-it-is).   You can do things similar to indexes in an SQL database, quite easily ... effectively, one piece of data is “in more than one place at one time.”   As long as you mind your P’s and Q’s ...