@PaigeHansen You don't have to apologize for being new. We were all new at some point.
GIS layers must be broken out by type: points, lines, and polygons can't be in the same feature class they have to be separate.
It is standard practice to have separate feature classes or layers for diffferent polygon layers.
Here are some examples:
Zoning (polygon feature class)
Parcels (polygon feature class)
Typically districts are broken out by type. So Cemetery, Diking, Fire, Commissioner districts etc would each have their own feature class.
One reason to do this is that the columns in the attribute table that go with feature that is drawn will typically have different columns needed.
Parcels in particular are unique because typically a tax assessors office is the one maintaining the tabular data in tax software that isn't GIS based. The parcels could be drawn by someone in their office or by a GIS technician in a different department.
So, sometimes the data that is in the attribute table that goes with the parcels is overwritten or copied from the assessor database and isn't maintained solely by the GIS technician.
Some people might not follow this as their standard but this is how I have always seen the data separated out.
If you are responsible for maintaining the datasets then I would keep them separate.
If you are wanting to make a custom map that includes information from the table of one feature in the table of a different layers feature then you can use tools like the intersect tool to to get the data to be together in one table.
Or if both tables have a same unique value you could possibly join them together by that value then use the export features tool to make a copy of features you want to use.
So you want to maintain data separately for good record keeping purposes, but for exercises you can combine things.
