There are hundreds of ways to organize your material and the method offered here may not be exactly the one you want to use. It's a method developed and refined over a ten-year period by a number of professional research firms in Salt Lake City. It includes forms and a filing system that are complementary and easy to use. Furthermore, it can be adapted for use with other systems. You're going to need some materials commonly used by genealogists.
Direct ancestors are parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc.
They represent your blood line. Pedigree charts are not designed to record all the known information about a family. They are used along with family group records as synopses of the information found in the records you've searched. They illustrate the information you already have and also show what remains to be added to complete the family group. A family group record includes information about a husband and wife and their children.