Do you believe in past lives and if so why?

I know this has been covered briefly before but this is an open discussion and please respect all points of view given. If you do not believe, then please say why out of respect for those that have also replied.

I knew generations back my family had come from Ireland but I had never visited it till the year before I moved here. I went to visit friends and the whole time I was here, I felt a sense of familiarity. Not the kind that you recognise things you have seen on tv etc but a deep inner knowing of the place.
I visited Limerick on my first visit and felt that sense of familiarity. On my second visit a few months later at a wedding, I went to Co Offaly (in the midlands) and immediately knew some of the places we visited in and around the area we were staying in. After that, we decided to move over for good...the pull to be here was that strong for me.
We moved in the October and by the end of that first week I knew I was home. The move was too easy and too comfortable for me not to have been here before. None of my mothers family had ever been back and so no one knew the areas I was in. And her family were originally from Co Cork and not where I was staying.
I have been blessed to make some wonderful friends here and have visited many of the sacred sites and have felt stirrings in my soul I have never felt anywhere before. I knew I have seen these things and felt like an 'overlap' of sensations was taking place. Like I was experiencing this for the first time (now) and had experienced it oh so many times in the past.

Whether you believe or you don't is fine. I know personally too many things have happened that have made me awaken to the fact that we know so little of this Universe and our part in it, that to close off from certain possibilities, will deny a part of who I am.
I know I am home and that feeling has been with me since the first day I stepped onto this soil and unlike my family who were all born in London, I never felt I belonged there and longed for open spaces and peace and quiet even as a child.