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Please help me sort out traditional chapter compositions.

There are supposed to be no more than 1000 marines in a chapter, if I am not mistaken. Well if each chapter has 10 companies each that alone is more than 1000 marines. If that is the case, you have no room for the Chapter master, champion and all of the unique leaders let alone the marines that operate heave support, bikes, etc,


So when writing your lore, how do you compose you chapters?

The 1k marines is just a goal set by codex astartes. Means nothing if looking at real existent numbers of space marines in a chapter.
So any head-count around 1000 SM would fit .
You dont need to cover the whole chapter with DIY lore.

Plus, those space marines having thier own codex may vary from this 1k idea.
So anything between a few hundred marines and a crusade sized force is ok.
Just remember to keep the numbers viable when writing fluff for a chapter, less than a 100 marines would mean they will have trouble to rebuild and more than 12-1500 would only fit to a BT crusade.

Yeah, don't do the entire chapter just work on a single company at a time if you want to get the whole thing done you will eventually. I like to add history from games that my army has played in as well. Which means I just need to start off with something fairly basic and more gets added on by itself as it goes.