I did that for a living for many years. The fist step is determine what is your end use, and I bet it is digital archive.
Hard drives are cheap, and I suggest you back up all the scans to multiple places, but that is another subject. Scan them at higher resolution than needed, it is easy to throw away resolution, but you simply can't bring it back from low resolution despite what TV detective TV shows say is possible.
When we cleared out my parents house I ended up with 5 or 6 large boxes of family photos. Most were labeled, and that helps. I spent untold hours scanning the prints. I ended up opening an account with Ancestry.com and built a family tree. I have a ton of photos that Ancestry.com can store forever, and other people building a tree can access my photos.
But back to scanning. Ignore the people saying 300 DPI (actually PPI) is all you need. It all depends on the size of the original print! More pixels is better, and hard drives storage space is just dirt cheap.
This is wallet size photo (2.25 x 3.25 inch) taken when my dad was just one year old.
I scanned the original at 1,200 PPI and the detail is amazing. If it was an 8x10 you don't likely want a 1,200 PPI scan, just 300 is fine for larger prints unless you plan to "zoom in" on faces in a large group photo.
Another BIG tip, is scan the images "flat" or with low to very low contrast. Once again it is super easy to add contrast, but a high contrast scan will never be made low contrast. Try to get detail in the shadows and the highlights in the scan, and then tweak the contrast and density with a photo editing program.
I have been using Photoshop since it was Aldus PhotoStyler and Adobe bought it and merged it into Photoshop. I love Photoshop since I know it. It is expensive and complex to learn, but it is the industry standard. Other programs can do what you need, and a scanner may well come with a program to edit the photos.
Back to Ancestry.com, they will keep my family tree "in the cloud" on their servers forever. I have had many distant cousins thank me for posting photos of their long long great grand uncle, or adding in the information to fill out a tree. I have the app on my phone, I can look up my tree anytime.
I also still have my original scan on my RAID 5 drive.
Have fun with the scan project.