Sorry for the delay. Glorious day in France so was forced to leave the computer and go and look at the Mediterrannean!
You are lucky researching in Beds in that the IGI on the family search link that Tricia provided has virtually all of the Beds parish registers pre 1812 included on it, and many parishes go up to the 1870s. But be very careful to diffentiate between member submissions and extracted records, which you'll find in the Messages section on the IGI Individual Record page. Extracted records are reliable, member submissions are not!
To avoid the member submitted dross try going in via the individual parish link on
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~hughwallis/IGIBatchNumbers/CountryEngland.htm#PageTitleThere's a marriage in Clifton between George Copperwaite and Mary Simson on 28 Nov 1835 which may be them - it's the only marriage showing in Beds with these names. I don't like the gap between 1835 and Charles born 1839/40 though. Unfortunately pre 1837 marriage entries in parish registers did not usually include fathers' names. All you get are the names of the witnesses and the parish of residence if not "of this parish".
So given my slight doubt here I would definitely get Charles' birth cert to confirm whether or not his mother's maiden name was Simson.
There's a George Copperwait christened at Clifton on 13 July 1817 aged 4, which is consistent with his age in 1841 (where ages over 15 were rounded down to the nearest 5 below, so 25 covered an actual age range of 25-29) and with the 1851 where he was 37 born Clifton.
I couldn't see a Mary Simson or Simpson but there was a Stimson family in Clifton at the right time, but I still can't see a Mary.
Clifton parish records are available on microfilm from your nearest Family History Centre of the LDS
That's probably more than enough to digest in one message! But as Tricia says, play around with the IGI on the LDS site.
Regards
David
