I'm afraid I don't understand your question exactly. But using families you can create a lot of components. The best way of using families is creating Object Styles. Using this option set up a correspondence between Object style and Material. After that in Properties dialog for each element you can assign a category(it's the same as Object Style). Material will be assigned automatically according Object Style Table. Another way is to assign material for component not , but choosing directly from list of materials defined in current family file.