Parse JSON String into List<string>

Seems like a bad way to do it (creating two correlated lists) but I'm assuming you have your reasons.

I'd parse the JSON string (which has a typo in your example, it's missing a comma between the two objects) into a strongly-typed object and then use a couple of LINQ queries to get the two lists.

void Main()
{
    string json = "{\"People\":[{\"FirstName\":\"Hans\",\"LastName\":\"Olo\"},{\"FirstName\":\"Jimmy\",\"LastName\":\"Crackedcorn\"}]}";

    var result = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<RootObject>(json);

    var firstNames = result.People.Select (p => p.FirstName).ToList();
    var lastNames = result.People.Select (p => p.LastName).ToList();
}

public class Person
{
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
}

public class RootObject
{
    public List<Person> People { get; set; }
}

Since you are using JSON.NET, personally I would go with serialization so that you can have Intellisense support for your object. You'll need a class that represents your JSON structure. You can build this by hand, or you can use something like json2csharp to generate it for you:

e.g.

public class Person
{
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
}

public class RootObject
{
    public List<Person> People { get; set; }
}

Then, you can simply call JsonConvert's methods to deserialize the JSON into an object:

RootObject instance = JsonConvert.Deserialize<RootObject>(json);

Then you have Intellisense:

var firstName = instance.People[0].FirstName;
var lastName = instance.People[0].LastName;